What the iaedp Lawsuit Accomplished

Recently, a federal court judge dismissed the lawsuit brought by Dr. Joy Zelikovsky and Holly-Renee Miller against iaedp. The judge concluded that we had not adequately established the relevant market and iaedp’s power within it as is required in antitrust cases. But to measure the impact of the litigation solely by the final court order is to ignore what happened to iaedp while the controversy unfolded.

The national iaedp organization that exists today is materially different from the one that was challenged. Longtime executive leader Bonnie Harken is gone. Iaedp changed the certification system at the center of the lawsuit. It removed mandatory membership, eliminated required symposium attendance, and abandoned the subjective case study requirement. It brought in new leadership, instituted open board elections, hired a new accounting firm, began audits of multiple prior years, strengthened financial controls, reviewed vendor contracts, revised its ethics statement, began reviewing its bylaws, and reworked its relationship with local chapters. Iaedp itself has acknowledged many of these reforms in a detailed list of changes made to its leadership, processes and operations.

That is the real story of the lawsuit.

The Certification System Changed

The central challenge was straightforward. Iaedp controlled the nationally recognized board certification used by eating disorder professionals and maintaining that certification required clinicians to continue purchasing iaedp membership and periodically attend iaedp’s symposium. The plaintiffs alleged that clinicians who had already invested heavily in earning the credential were being forced to buy separate products and services simply to keep it.

Those requirements are now gone.

For eating disorder professionals, that is not an abstract legal development. It means clinicians no longer must pay annual membership dues merely to preserve their certification, and they no longer have to incur the registration, travel, lodging and lost work costs associated with attending a national symposium because their credential depends upon it. Over the course of a career, those changes can save an individual professional thousands of dollars.

The certification system should measure competence, training and professional qualifications. It should not be used to compel unrelated spending. Whatever the court ultimately concluded about the antitrust theory, the practical conduct being challenged was changed.

Governance and Financial Practices Came Under Scrutiny

The litigation also forced serious internal practices into the public record. The pleadings raised questions concerning iaedp’s tax filings, financial controls, the absence of independent audits, the relationship between the Foundation and Ms. Harken’s management company, and the extraordinary concentration of authority in a single individual.

The complaint revealed that Ms. Harken received approximately $617,000 from 2018 through 2021 while exercising control over iaedp’s finances. It also showed that iaedp had gone more than a decade without an independent audit and that tax filings and state regulatory documents contained material irregularities. This information became part of the public record and placed practices that previously received little scrutiny squarely before the profession.

Among the most serious allegations concerned annual reports filed with the Illinois Secretary of State bearing the purported signatures of iaedp officers. The complaint showed those signatures had been placed on the documents without authorization, and two officers submitted sworn declarations stating that they had neither signed the filings nor known of their existence. Regardless of the ultimate disposition of the lawsuit, conduct of that nature deserved scrutiny because a professional organization that promotes ethics must be held to the same standards of integrity it expects from the people it certifies.

Tax Obligations Were Addressed

The litigation also exposed substantial tax issues. The pleadings revealed that the California Franchise Tax Board investigated iaedp and assessed past due taxes, penalties and interest totaling six figures. Information developed during the controversy later indicated that iaedp made a substantial payment to address those obligations.

Again, the significance is broader than the amount itself. Professional organizations rely on credibility, and credibility depends upon responsible governance, lawful financial practices and accurate regulatory filings. Tax compliance and corporate accountability are not secondary matters when an organization is simultaneously certifying professionals and holding itself out as a guardian of ethical standards.

The Chapter Structure Was Reexamined

The lawsuit also brought attention to iaedp’s relationship with its local chapters. The pleadings described at least 29 supposedly independent chapters incorporated in Illinois under a structure that placed substantial control in the hands of national leadership. Problems involving required filings, inactive or suspended entities and control over chapter finances became part of the dispute.

Iaedp has since acknowledged assisting chapters with corporate filings and reexamining dues and chapter relationships. That movement toward greater chapter independence is important. Local professionals join chapters to build local professional communities, provide education and support colleagues. Those chapters should have meaningful autonomy and clear governance rather than existing primarily as extensions of a centralized administrative structure.

New Leadership Deserves Credit

The purpose of exposing institutional problems should not be destruction. It should be reform.

Iaedp’s current leadership deserves credit for implementing changes that should strengthen the organization. Dra. Eva Trujillo is currently President of the iaedp Foundation, serving a 2025 to 2027 term. She has emphasized governance, financial oversight, organizational stability and rebuilding trust. Before the litigation was filed, I had the privilege of getting to know Dra. Trujillo and am, and remain, very impressed with her as a professional and person. Most recently, she publicly credited Dawn Gannon with helping strengthen iaedp’s systems, governance and financial stability and endorsed Ms. Gannon’s elevation to CEO. I also got to know Ms. Gannon when she and Elissa Myers were shepherding AED to a much greater international presence. I came to know and respect Ms. Gannon as well.

Bringing in Ms. Gannon, opening board elections, increasing board involvement in financial oversight, initiating audits, hiring a new accounting firm, revising ethics policies, reviewing bylaws and changing the certification structure are meaningful steps. They suggest an organization attempting to move away from concentrated authority and toward more conventional nonprofit governance.

The eating disorder field benefits from strong professional organizations. But strength does not come from avoiding criticism. It comes from being capable of responding to legitimate criticism with transparency, accountability and reform. Under Ms. Harken, those qualities was missing.

On August 29, 2023, as part of a correspondence I sent to Ms. Harken, the following language was included:

“Now, in the past when confronted with iaedp’s many issues and circumstances, I would ordinarily start publishing scathing articles. In this case, I would also contact iaedp’s CPA, the Attorney General of Illinois, the Attorney General of California and the IRS. Ethics complaints would be filed. I would have also contacted every person on iaedp’s Board of Directors advising them of these issues.

It is substantially likely that iaedp would not withstand this type of scrutiny and as an organization, it would not survive. But, out of my respect for some respected professionals in the community, I have not undertaken these actions … yet.

In fact, I have been strongly encouraged to attempt resolution quietly and confidentially with you and iaedp. I have reached out in good faith.

I welcome an open discussion with you in which we attempt to correct any misconceptions and right all wrongs. I also believe this can best be accomplished by bringing in a few third parties to work together collaboratively.”

More than anything, we hoped that a professional dialogue addressing the serious issues iaedp was facing would have resulted in progress and reform. Instead, we received communication that Ms. Harken was prepared to “fight to the bitter end.”

So tragic and so unfortunate. Especially when you consider that the vast majority of the issues and reform being sought pre-litigation … was implemented after litigation was filed and after Ms. Harken was replaced.

Joy Zelikovsky and Holly-Renee Miller Deserve Recognition

None of these issues would have received the same level of attention without courageous, resilient, strong people willing to publicly step forward. I heard from numerous people privately supporting the lawsuit and the reforms being sought. As is their right, they chose to not become involved.

But Dr. Joy Zelikovsky and Holly-Renee Miller placed their names on a federal lawsuit against an organization whose credential carries professional significance within their own field. They did so knowing the eating disorder community is relatively small, relationships overlap, and challenging an established institution can carry professional consequences. They accepted scrutiny, criticism and uncertainty because they believed the practices should be challenged. And as a result, iaedp, the institution they challenged evolved in ways that closely tracked many of the concerns and issues raised during the dispute.

These changes did not occur spontaneously, and they did not begin because iaedp suddenly discovered problems that had existed for years. They began only after the practices of the organization and the overbearing authority exercised by Bonnie Harken were formally challenged. For years, no one within the eating disorder professional community had been willing to confront that power in any meaningful way. The demand for change, followed by the lawsuit brought by Joy and Holly-Renee, broke that silence and forced the issues into the open.

As stated, current leadership deserves credit for implementing reforms. But the catalyst for those reforms was the challenge. Without the demand and the lawsuit, there is every reason to believe the existing structure would have continued as it had for years. The certification requirements did not simply disappear. Leadership did not simply change. Audits, financial controls, open elections, chapter restructuring and greater accountability did not suddenly become priorities by coincidence. They followed sustained scrutiny that would not have existed but for two professionals who were willing to challenge an entrenched system when virtually no one else would.

The litigation forced questions that needed to be asked. Joy Zelikovsky and Holly-Renee Miller were willing to publicly ask those questions. Their voices were heard. That is the true victory. Joy and Holly-Renee deserve sincere thanks from the eating disorder professional community.

We are entering an evolving era in the research, treatment and understanding of eating disorders. At the same time, we are facing new, daunting issues which challenge us in ways never before experienced nor imagined. The manner in which business was conducted in the past is not designed to meet and overcome those challenges.

As a community, we must find new, better, collaborative solutions. We must learn to respect intelligent, reasonable and evidence-based voices. We must not be afraid to voice our opinions but respectfully and with open ears and open hearts. An uncertain future awaits. A certain which requires courage, vision and resolve. Qualities which were demonstrated by Joy and Holly-Renee.

Qualities which we all surely must have.

EQUIP’S TRANSITION TRACK: AN UNTESTED HIGH ACUITY GAMBLE

On October 7, 2026, Equip announced its latest attempt to capture a larger part of the eating disorder market. It launched a program designed to move recently hospitalized eating disorder patients directly into virtual home treatment instead of residential care, PHP or IOP. Equip assigned the label, “Transition Track” to this program.

However, Equip did not identify any independent comparative research establishing that Transition Track can safely replace those levels of care for the patients and families Equip is targeting. That evidentiary failure is not academic. In eating disorder treatment, having a patient languish in an inappropriate level of care can result in tragedy.

Equip is not experimenting with a different appointment schedule or a more convenient way to deliver ordinary outpatient therapy. Transition Track reaches into one of the most dangerous moments in eating disorder treatment, the period immediately after inpatient hospitalization. It asks physicians, hospitals and families to send selected patients home rather than into the structured treatment they otherwise might receive. Equip describes the program as an alternative for medically stabilized patients ages 6 through 24 who otherwise may qualify for traditional in person programs.

If that premise is wrong for a patient, the consequence can extend far beyond relapse or another hospital bill. A patient who requires continuous supervision, professionally supported meals, intensive psychiatric monitoring and immediate access to trained personnel may instead be at home while family members attempt to perform functions ordinarily provided by an experienced treatment staff. This against a backdrop where eating disorders carry substantial mortality risk, including from suicide and medical complications, and recent meta-analyses continue to document sharply elevated mortality in anorexia nervosa. PubMed

Transition Track therefore presents a brutally simple question … What independent evidence established that this specific group of recently hospitalized patients can safely bypass the structured level of care they otherwise would have received? The public record examined to date provides no satisfactory answer.

What Equip Actually Tested

Four days before Transition Track was publicly launched, Equip presented its development process at the American Academy of Pediatrics National Conference. The presentation was classified as a Program Evaluation, not a prospective outcomes trial comparing Transition Track against residential treatment, PHP, IOP or another established level of care. AAP National Conference

Equip interviewed seven adolescent medicine inpatient specialists and twelve parents of previously hospitalized children. The physicians evaluated clinical vignettes and ranked nineteen treatment components, while parents were asked about the acceptability of proposed enhancements. Equip used a Kano questionnaire, a product development tool designed to determine how the presence or absence of features affects user satisfaction. AAP National Conference

That process produced Transition Track. It certainly did not clinically validate Transition Track.

Equip’s own findings about Transition Track disclose that clinical recommendations and family willingness to enroll did not always align. The physicians emphasized greater direct observation during meals and stronger caregiver preparation. However, when Equip tested proposed program features with parents, intensive nightly meal support made families less likely to enroll, while weekday lunch supervision and easier access to nutritional coaching were more acceptable. Equip therefore designed Transition Track by balancing safeguards clinicians believed would reduce clinical risk against the level of treatment intensity families were willing to accept. AAP National Conference

Read that again in the context of the population involved. These are patients coming directly from inpatient hospitalization, some of whom otherwise would enter highly structured treatment. Yet one component of the design process specifically measured whether stronger treatment requirements would discourage enrollment. The resulting program was built not solely from an inquiry into the maximum clinical protections needed by these patients, but from an effort to reconcile clinical recommendations with what families would accept.

That is product design. Calling it anything more gives the process scientific authority it has not earned and does not have.

Equip’s Own Research Does Not Validate Transition Track

Citing a 2023 study led by Dori Steinberg and other Equip researchers, Equip’s AAP presentation attempted to establish the foundation for its program by asserting that virtual comprehensive outpatient treatment can produce results comparable to traditional in person treatment. The problem is that the cited study did not test Transition Track. It did not compare hospital discharges sent into Transition Track with comparable patients sent into residential treatment or PHP. This was clearly not an independent study. AAP National Conference

The Steinberg study involved 210 patients receiving Equip’s virtual enhanced Family Based Treatment. It was a before and after observational cohort without a concurrent comparison group. Weight was self-reported, participants had selected virtual treatment, the study was internally funded by Equip, and every listed author was affiliated with Equip’s clinical department. The authors themselves identified the need for future randomized research comparing virtual FBT plus with in person FBT plus. PubMed

That study may provide information about patients treated virtually by Equip. But it does not establish that Transition Track is an equivalent substitute for residential treatment or PHP following inpatient hospitalization because that was not the question studied.

The distinction between FBT and Transition Track is equally stark. Evidence showing that Family Based Treatment can work does not establish that every program incorporating family participation is validated, particularly after changing patient acuity, timing of discharge, professional supervision and the level of care being displaced. A study of outpatient FBT cannot be stretched until it becomes proof that a recently hospitalized patient who might otherwise enter PHP or residential care can safely be redirected into a newly designed virtual pathway.

That is not evidence-based medicine. It is biased information by extrapolation.

And Yet Equip Is Moving Into Increasingly Complicated Patients

Equip’s own Transition Track materials describe possible candidates as including patients with NG tubes, suicidal ideation, self-injurious behavior, repeated higher level of care admissions, significant medical or psychiatric comorbidity and complicated home environments. Presumably, parents have sufficient medical knowledge to oversee those conditions. That population bears little resemblance to the tightly defined cohorts used in much of the research Equip can point toward.

It is also precisely why broad reliance upon “medical stability” is so dangerous. Being medically stable enough to leave an acute hospital does not answer whether a patient can interrupt eating disorder behaviors without structured supervision, whether suicidality can safely be managed at home, whether parents can provide the necessary containment or whether the patient belongs in PHP or residential treatment.

APA, AAP and SAHM guidance all contemplate those additional factors. Transition Track attempts to move the practical dividing line anyway.

A Founder’s Experience Became Part of the Treatment Philosophy

Equip’s CEO, Kristina Saffran has repeatedly described her own recovery from anorexia as central to the creation of Equip. After multiple hospitalizations, she stated that remaining at home with intensive family involvement and Family Based Treatment ultimately saved her life. That experience plainly helped shape Equip’s emphasis on home-based recovery and caregiver participation. Ms. Saffran has certainly earned our respect and admiration for her recovery and for her participation and leadership in the community.

But the experience of one patient cannot validate a national treatment pathway. Transition Track takes a philosophy influenced in part by Ms. Saffran’s personal recovery and applies it to patients ages 6 through 24, including patients leaving inpatient hospitalization who otherwise may enter residential treatment, PHP or IOP. Those patients vary enormously in illness severity, diagnosis, psychiatric comorbidity, developmental stage and family capacity.

Ms. Saffran’s recovery may explain why Equip believes deeply in treatment at home. It does not establish that virtual treatment at home is safe for every population into which Equip now seeks to expand especially since it is doubtful that Ms. Saffran’s recovery relied in whole or in part upon virtual care. That requires independent evidence specific to the patients and treatment pathway involved, and that evidence has not been identified in the public record.

The Financial Architecture Is Already Built

Transition Track must also be examined as a business product because the economics are impossible to separate from the clinical pathway. Every hospital patient sent directly into Equip rather than an outside residential program, PHP or IOP becomes an Equip patient and financially benefits Equip. Equip says the initial intensive period can lead into continuing treatment lasting as long as twelve months.

The home also becomes part of the economic model. Residential programs must maintain buildings, kitchens, around the clock staffing, direct supervision and the physical infrastructure necessary to manage seriously ill patients. Equip places the patient at home and shifts substantial portions of continuous observation, meal support and behavioral management to unskilled family members while providing its professional services virtually and part time.

For investors, the attraction is obvious. Equip can move into more severe and potentially more highly reimbursed populations without constructing residential campuses throughout the country. Especially since a patient entering a program at hospital discharge may remain within the company’s system for months.

This expansion also tracks remarkably closely with the investment thesis publicly articulated by interests represented on Equip’s board. Tom Bremner, a partner in Adams Street Partners, and who sits on Equip’s board, published Behavioral Health 2.0: Moving Up the Acuity Ladder in 2025. He identified Equip as an example of companies capable of moving technology enabled behavioral healthcare into more severe and expensive populations. The thesis emphasized scalable care, case rates, bundled reimbursement, shared savings and reducing total healthcare costs for payers. Which raises the question, was the Transition Track created by venture capital interests to create a larger return on investment?

Certainly, Transition Track epitomizes Mr. Bremner’s investment thesis translated into a product. It reaches higher acuity patients earlier, intercepts them before they enter more expensive competing programs, keeps treatment inside Equip’s virtual infrastructure and offers insurers the prospect of avoiding residential and PHP expenditures. Return on investment increases when the company grows, payer economics improve when expensive care is avoided and Equip increases revenue when the patient stays within Equip rather than entering an outside higher level of care.

That alignment is not hidden. It is the business architecture. It is Equip.

The Conflict Runs Straight Through the Level of Care Decision

Equip already participates in value-based reimbursement arrangements, including a relationship with Aetna involving shared risk and outcome-based components. Transition Track increases the economic value of those arrangements because preventing a residential or PHP episode can generate far greater cost avoidance than reducing ordinary outpatient utilization.

That places the most consequential clinical decision at the intersection of two powerful financial interests. If a patient enters residential treatment or PHP, Equip loses the patient and the insurer payer assumes a much larger expense. If the patient goes home through Transition Track, Equip retains the patient and the payer potentially avoids a more costly episode. However, the patient does not receive a financial benefit from choosing the cheaper pathway. The patient receives either the correct level of care or the wrong one.

Since eating disorders have a disproportionately high mortality rate, an unvalidated cost saving substitution should face the highest evidentiary barrier imaginable. Instead, Transition Track reached the market after a development exercise involving seven physicians, twelve parents and an analysis of what features made families more willing to enroll.

The 6,000 Patient Claim Proves Far Less Than It Appears

Equip has referred to nearly 6,000 historical patients who either stepped down from inpatient treatment or met what it characterizes as certain APA criteria associated with PHP level care. Those patients were not 6,000 Transition Track patients. They were also not participants in a prospective comparative trial establishing that Transition Track could replace residential care or PHP.

Equip also touts a greater than 90 percent rate of avoiding discharge to higher levels of care. That statistic tells us that most patients were retained rather than escalated, but it cannot independently establish whether every retention decision was clinically correct when escalation itself is the decision being examined. Equip’s representation also ignores the existing, questionable internal issues regarding improper retention of patients.

A company cannot validate a low escalation rate merely by pointing to the low escalation rate. The clinically relevant record would include deterioration, emergency care, rehospitalization, suicide related events, subsequent admission to residential or PHP care, treatment completion and sustained recovery after discharge. Transition Track has no publicly identified independent comparative body of evidence answering those questions for the population it now seeks to divert from traditional higher care.

The Larger Threat Is What Happens After Insurers Accept the Premise

The greatest danger is not confined to individual Equip patients. If Transition Track gains traction with insurers and hospitals before independent research validates the substitution, a commercial theory can gradually become an industry expectation.

The economic pressure would be enormous. Residential treatment and PHP are more expensive, while a virtual program operating through families and centralized clinicians can be delivered without the same physical infrastructure. Once payers become comfortable authorizing the virtual pathway after hospitalization, clinicians will increasingly confront a system in which the less expensive option is presumed sufficient, and the more expensive structured option requires additional justification.

That would dramatically alter the eating disorder treatment landscape without a randomized comparative trial ever having established the premise that drove the change. An untested treatment pathway could become a reimbursement strategy first and a clinical standard second. And patients and families will pay the ultimate price.

The families placed inside that system would confront the consequences in their own homes. They could be asked to supervise profoundly ill loved ones while believing that a virtual company has demonstrated the home is clinically equivalent to the structured setting that was bypassed, when no independent comparative research has established that proposition.

This Is Already the Experiment

Transition Track is operating now, and the appropriate judgment must be made from the evidence that now exists. Especially since it is naïve to believe Equip and its VC investors will voluntarily open Equip’s internal records or produce evidence that has not appeared publicly

As such, we are relegated to a record that shows a newly designed program aimed at recently hospitalized high acuity patients, developed through interviews with only seven physicians and twelve parents, with explicit attention to physician referral confidence and family willingness to enroll. It shows a clinical design in which stronger meal support collided with enrollment acceptance, a founder whose own recovery experience helped shape the company’s philosophy, a business model that benefits from keeping patients inside Equip and outside more expensive programs, and venture capital investors whose published strategy specifically embraces scalable movement into higher acuity behavioral healthcare.

It also does not show an independent prospective comparative trial demonstrating that Transition Track can safely replace residential treatment, PHP or IOP for the patients being targeted. That is the indictment.

Equip has taken an unproven clinical proposition, attached it to an extraordinarily attractive economic model, extrapolated far beyond the research it cites and begun inserting that proposition into one of the most dangerous transition points in eating disorder treatment. Its investors will profit if the model scales, insurers can save money if more expensive care is avoided and Equip can retain patients who otherwise might leave its system.

But the risk travels in the opposite direction. It travels to the patient and the family sitting at home after hospitalization, depending upon a treatment model that has not been independently shown to be equivalent to the structured care it replaced. That reality has not been disclosed.

And the silence is deafening.

WHO REALLY GOVERNS EQUIP?

Equip Health presents itself as an eating disorder treatment company built around evidence-based care, families and access. It is also a heavily financed private corporation that has raised almost $164 million from investors including F Prime Capital, Optum Ventures, .406 Ventures, The Chernin Group, Tiger Global, General Catalyst and Adams Street Partners.

Those investments are not charitable contributions. Venture investors provide capital in exchange for ownership and the prospect that their equity will become substantially more valuable. Eventually, that value must become liquid through a sale, public offering, secondary transaction, recapitalization or some other exit.

That financial structure requires a closer examination of who governs the company and who benefits from growth. In Equip’s case, two relationships deserve particular attention: one director publicly articulated an investment strategy centered on treating higher acuity behavioral health patients at scale; while another represents an Optum affiliated venture fund connected to the UnitedHealth Group ecosystem that includes UnitedHealthcare.

Follow the Money

F Prime Capital led Equip’s seed financing. Optum Ventures led its $13 million Series A in February 2021. In 2022, The Chernin Group led a $58 million Series B joined by Tiger Global and General Catalyst, with F Prime Capital, Optum Ventures and .406 Ventures participating again. Another financing followed in 2023 and was reported in April 2024, and Equip’s September 2025 SEC filing reports approximately $54 million sold in its then disclosed equity offering.

The total approaches $164 million.

The exact ownership percentages of those investors are not public. Equip is privately held and its capitalization table has not been disclosed. SEC Form D filings reveal the number of securities sold and the number of investors participating in particular offerings, but they do not reveal each investor’s present percentage ownership, voting rights, liquidation preferences or the effects of dilution across financing rounds.

Although the ownership percentages therefore cannot responsibly be estimated from public financing figures, the board structure can.

Five of Eight Directors Are Investor Affiliated

Equip’s September 2025 SEC filing identifies eight directors. Three are company executives or founders: Kristina Saffran, Erin Parks and Nikia Bergan. The remaining five are affiliated with investment firms: Holly Maloney of General Catalyst, Jon Lim of F Prime Capital, Tom Bremner of Adams Street Partners, Laura Veroneau of Optum Ventures and Maureen Sullivan of The Chernin Group. Investor affiliated directors therefore hold five of eight seats, or 62.5 percent of the board by headcount.

Equip’s own website is even more striking. Under its public Board of Directors section, Equip only displays those five investor affiliated directors. Whatever private voting arrangements may exist, the public corporate structure places professional investors directly inside the body charged with overseeing the company.

Equip is a Delaware corporation. Under Delaware law, the business and affairs of a corporation are managed by or under the direction of its board except where governing documents provide otherwise. These investors are therefore not merely shareholders waiting outside the room for quarterly updates. Their representatives occupy a numerical majority of the board responsible for corporate governance and establishes that venture capital interests are not only deeply embedded within Equip’s governance structure but are protected.

Of great concern is Equip’s relationship with Optum Ventures and its affiliated companies. By reviewing how this business relationship is intertwined, we can start to get a glimpse at Equip, its business operations and its recent marketing campaign.

The Optum Connection Goes Beyond Venture Capital

Laura Veroneau is not simply the representative of another venture fund. She is the Managing Partner and a founding team member of Optum Ventures, which was founded in 2017 in partnership with UnitedHealth Group and now manages more than $2 billion across six funds. Optum Ventures led Equip’s $13 million Series A in February 2021, participated again in the $58 million Series B, and retains a board seat through Veroneau. Equip’s 2021 announcement described Optum Ventures as the independent venture fund of Optum and part of UnitedHealth Group.

The connection extends beyond ownership. UnitedHealth Group describes Optum and UnitedHealthcare as its two complementary businesses. Equip currently identifies both UnitedHealthcare and Optum as in network plans, while UnitedHealthcare states that Optum Behavioral Health Solutions handles behavioral health credentialing and contracting on its behalf. Optum Ventures itself promotes its connectivity across UnitedHealth Group, health plans and providers as an investment advantage.

This creates a structural alignment worth examining. Equip gains revenue and valuation if more patients can be treated virtually. A payer (like Optum and UnitedHealthcare) can potentially reduce expenditures when virtual clinical care substitutes for residential, PHP or IOP care. The venture investor benefits if Equip grows. Finally, give key executives like the CEO, the Medical Director and other officers equity interest in Equip. And the picture starts to become clear. As do the obvious conflicts on interest.

The question then becomes whether the board maintained meaningful separation among investor interests, payer economics and clinical judgment as Equip moved toward increasingly high acuity patients.

“Moving Up the Acuity Ladder”

One director provides an unusually revealing window into the investment philosophy surrounding Equip and its marketing strategy.

Tom Bremner is a Partner on the Venture Growth team at Adams Street Partners and a director of Equip. On July 8, 2025, Adams Street published an article co-authored by Bremner titled “Behavioral Health 2.0: Moving Up the Acuity Ladder.”

The strategy was direct. Bremner argued that the next generation of behavioral health companies would move beyond lower acuity patients and increasingly serve people with more complicated clinical conditions. He described an opportunity for platforms capable of treating the “highest need patients at scale.”

Equip was specifically identified as an example.

The article also described the economic side of the strategy. Higher need patients generate significant health care expenditures. Programs capable of treating them “at scale” can attract payer interest and support case rates, bundled payments, shared savings arrangements and other value-based reimbursement models. Notice that nowhere does Bremner discuss quality of care or the needs of the patient.

Fourteen days after Bremner’s article appeared, Equip recorded the first sale of securities in its next financing. That offering ultimately exceeded $54 million. Bremner appears as a director in the SEC filing.

Bremner’s article demonstrates a documented investor strategy, articulated publicly by an Equip director, centered on treating progressively more complex behavioral health patients “at scale.” Equip’s subsequent marketing moved in precisely that direction.

From Investment Strategy to Marketing Message

As a result, Equip now tells families and professionals that its treatment is “proven” for medically stable patients needing a high level of care who might otherwise seek IOP or PHP treatment. The company also says that 87 percent of its patients are high acuity.

Then came an even more aggressive solicitation. Equip asked referral sources to transition their “highest acuity” eating disorder patients into “acute, virtual care.” Those phrases place the company near the clinical boundary separating home based treatment from more intensive professionally staffed care. They also mirror the business direction described in the Adams Street strategy … moving up the acuity ladder and treating higher need patients “at scale.”

The timing becomes more significant when those representations are placed beside allegations from inside Equip.

What Medical Professionals Saw Inside the Company

A former Equip medical professional alleges in federal court litigation that the company’s admission screening criteria were removed in approximately March 2025 and that Equip thereafter began accepting increasingly medically complex and high-risk patients. According to the complaint, some patients required levels of care beyond what Equip’s virtual model could safely provide.

The plaintiff further alleges that providers across disciplines raised patient safety concerns and that compensation incentives rewarded keeping patients enrolled for at least sixteen weeks. He alleges that Equip’s Medical Director, Amy Rapaport instructed him not to document or discuss recommendations for higher levels of care arising from medical risk, morbidity or mortality concerns.

The complaint also describes a conversation involving patients whose medical complexity and acuity allegedly exceeded Equip’s ability to manage them safely. According to the plaintiff, the discussion included a possible “palliative care approach” and the phrase “illusion of care.”

These allegations address exactly the clinical boundary Equip was simultaneously expanding in its business and marketing strategy, i.e. how sick a patient could become while remaining inside a virtual treatment model.

The chronology is difficult to ignore. Equip removed its admission criteria in March 2025. Internal concerns were raised in April and May. Bremner published “Moving Up the Acuity Ladder” in July. Equip commenced another major financing that same month. By 2026, Equip was openly soliciting the “highest acuity” patients for “acute, virtual care.”

The Economic Value of Higher Acuity

The financial incentives surrounding expansion are not complicated. A virtual platform does not need to build a residential facility in each market it enters. Adding payer contracts increases the number of potential patients. Medicaid agreements open additional populations. Treating adults expands the available market beyond adolescents. Increasing patient retention increases revenue generated from each admission.

Moving into patients who might otherwise require IOP or PHP potentially expands the company into populations associated with considerably greater treatment expenditures. A company representing that it can treat larger numbers of patients, across more states, through more payers, for longer periods and at greater clinical complexity may command a substantially higher valuation than a company confined to conventional outpatient care.

The Exit Is Part of the Equation

$164 million dollars of venture investment ultimately requires liquidity.

The conventional pathways are well established. Equip could be acquired by a larger health care company, insurer, technology platform or financial sponsor. It could merge with another company. It could pursue an initial public offering or another transaction allowing shares eventually to trade publicly.

Investors may also obtain liquidity before a complete sale. Existing shareholders can sometimes sell private shares through secondary transactions, company sponsored tender offers or later financing rounds in which new investors purchase shares from earlier investors.

Nasdaq Private Market already maintains an Equip Health page through which eligible shareholders may explore selling shares and qualified investors may express interest in purchasing them. That does not establish that Equip or its venture investors are currently selling shares. It does demonstrate that a mechanism exists through which private Equip equity potentially can become liquid without an IPO or complete company sale.

Older venture investments also create a natural passage of time. F Prime’s relationship with Equip dates to 2019. Venture funds ordinarily are not designed to hold portfolio companies indefinitely.

The potential value of an exit therefore depends heavily on the company’s growth story at the time liquidity arrives.

Who Really Governs Equip?

There is no public evidence, yet, that Equip’s investors ordered its clinicians to retain unsafe patients, remove admission requirements or implement its marketing claims. But neither are those investors distant financial spectators.

They represent five of the eight directors. Their firms supplied much of the $164 million that allowed Equip to expand. One investor director publicly articulated a strategy of moving behavioral health companies “up the acuity ladder.” Another represents Optum Ventures, linking Equip’s board to the UnitedHealth Group ecosystem in which Equip is also an Optum and UnitedHealthcare network provider. Equip then pursued and marketed increasingly high acuity patients while serious allegations concerning clinical capacity were being raised from within the company.

The unresolved issue is therefore not merely what individual doctors, admissions employees or marketing personnel did. It is what the people governing Equip knew while the company was growing. Or for that matter, whether Equip’s board is directly responsible for its questionable conduct.

There is one, very important issue Equip’s board need to consider. That is … board members potentially have both FTC exposure and federal/state Medicaid fraud exposure. And a number of state and federal agencies may soon be knocking at Equip’s door. And Equip’s door may not be the only one.

Especially since, whereas Equip’s capitalization table is private … its board is not.

A former Equip medical professional alleges in a recent federal lawsuit that his supervising physician instructed him not to record in medical charts that certain patients needed a higher level of care because of medical risk, morbidity, or mortality concerns. The lawsuit identifies the physician as Dr. Amy Rapaport, the Medical Director of Equip, and places the instruction during a coaching session on or about May 8, 2025.

Allegations in the lawsuit from this former employee are set forth in the numbered passages below. The original paragraph numbers from the complaint are maintained so readers can examine what the former employee directly alleged rather than rely on my characterization of them:

85. On or about May 8, 2025, Dr. Rapaport issued a verbal coaching to Plaintiff.

86. During this coaching, Dr. Rapaport warned Plaintiff not to express anything “negative” or that opposed Defendant’s model in team huddles or in patient charts.

87. Dr. Rapaport specifically instructed Plaintiff that he should not indicate in patient charts or team meetings that a patient should be in a higher level of care and not admitted to Defendant’s program due to medical risk, morbidity, or mortality concerns. [emphasis added]

88. Dr. Rapaport stated that Defendants’ mission would not change, that the company would continue to ‘provide care for all,’ and that any additional concerns or views not ‘100% aligned with Equip’s values’ should be raised only in one-on-one evaluations with supervisors.

89. Dr. Rapaport told Plaintiff it was acceptable to have different views and express concerns but not to do so publicly in team meetings or on Slack.

90. Dr. Rapaport’s instructions were designed to suppress Plaintiff’s ability to advocate for patient safety and appropriate levels of care.

The distinction in paragraph 87 is critical. The former employee does not merely allege that he was told to stop criticizing management. He alleges that he was told not to document that a patient needed more intensive treatment even though remaining in Equip’s program presented medical risks. Paragraph 88 describes where concerns were supposed to go instead … private evaluations with supervisors. Where they could be buried.

A medical record that omits that information can leave the next clinician, the referring physician, the insurer, and the patient with a dangerously incomplete picture. The lawsuit describes an instruction under which safety concerns should only be shared privately with management while being withheld from the record and the team responsible for treatment.

“Illusion of Care” … Words Attributed to Equip’s own Supervisors

The exact phrase, “Illusion of Care” appears in paragraph 75 of the lawsuit. The former employee attributes those words to his immediate supervisor, Heather Karpey, NP, and to a supervising physician, Dr. Maria La Via.

75. Plaintiff’s supervisor, Ms. Karpey, on multiple occasions referred to Defendants’ treatment model as providing an “illusion of care,” acknowledging that Defendants’ program created the appearance of adequate treatment while lacking the capacity to provide it. Dr. La Via also used the phrase “illusion of care” during a one-on-one meeting with Plaintiff when discussing the palliative care approach to patients whose medical needs exceeded what Defendants’ program could safely manage.

The complaint places this discussion with Dr. La Via in the context of concerns about some of Equip’s sickest patients. It describes a meeting on or about April 10, 2025:

70. On or about April 10, 2025, Plaintiff raised patient safety concerns with Maria La Via, MD, Defendant’s backup supervising physician, in his one-on-one meeting document.

71. Plaintiff expressed concerns about providing medical care to Defendant’s sickest patients whose medical complexity and acuity exceeded what Defendant’s program could safely manage.

72. Dr. La Via responded by suggesting that Plaintiff approach care for these critically ill patients as a “palliative care approach.”

73. Defendants are not palliative care companies and does not provide palliative care services.

74. Dr. La Via’s response demonstrated that Defendant’s supervising physicians were aware that patients being admitted to Defendant’s program were critically ill and medically inappropriate for the level of care Defendant provided, yet Defendant continued to accept and retain these patients.

The concern is not simply that a physician used the term “palliative care.” It is that she suggested that approach after a clinician warned that patients’ medical needs exceeded what the program could safely manage. Paragraph 74 states the plaintiff’s conclusion … supervising physicians knew that patients were medically inappropriate for the level of care being provided, yet the company continued accepting and retaining them.

These cumulative issues raise specific questions for Equip’s medical leadership. What clinical assessment supported Equip’s policies? What treatment were those patients actually receiving, what alternatives were considered, and what were patients and families told about the program’s limitations?

Admissions, Retention and the Price of Speaking Up

The complaint also describes decisions affecting who entered the program and how providers were financially rewarded for keeping patients enrolled. It dates the alleged removal of admission screening criteria to March 2025, before the April discussion with Dr. La Via and the May instruction attributed to Dr. Rapaport.

27. In or around March 2025, Defendant Equip removed its admission screening criteria for new patients.

28. Prior to the removal of admission criteria, Defendant Equip had maintained screening standards designed to ensure that admitted patients were appropriate for Defendant Equip’s level of care and to protect both patients and providers.

29. Following the removal of admission criteria, Defendant Equip began accepting increasingly medically complex, severely ill, and high-risk patients into its eating disorder treatment program.

30. Some of the patients being admitted to Defendant Equip’s program required a higher level of care than Defendant Equip’s telehealth model could safely provide.

31. Defendant Equip’s removal of admission criteria was part of its “provide care for all” policy, which prioritized revenue and patient volume over patient safety and clinical appropriateness.

32. The removal of admission criteria substantially increased the danger to patients by admitting individuals whose medical needs exceeded what Defendant Equip’s program could safely manage.

33. Providers, including Plaintiff, began expressing concerns that critically ill patients should be medically discharged to higher levels of care rather than admitted to or maintained in Defendant Equip’s program. [emphasis added]

34. Despite these safety concerns, Defendant Equip implemented financial incentives that discouraged providers from discharging medically inappropriate patients to higher levels of care. [emphasis added]

35. Defendant Equip tied provider bonuses to keeping patients in service for a minimum of sixteen weeks, which created a financial incentive to retain patients who should have been transferred to more intensive treatment settings. [emphasis added]

36. This bonus structure directly created safety issues for patients who needed higher levels of care but were retained in Defendant Equip’s program due to the financial incentives.

37. Defendant Equip also tied provider bonuses to a “trust your village” Key Performance Indicator, which essentially meant that providers should not express concerns or ask questions that could be perceived as opposing viewpoints to Defendant Equip’s treatment model.

38. This KPI further discouraged providers from raising legitimate patient safety concerns or advocating for appropriate care levels.

The accusation that revenue displaced patient safety appears explicitly in paragraph 31. It is the plaintiff’s direct allegation, not a motive supplied by this article. Paragraphs 34 through 38 then describe the mechanism he says reinforced it … bonuses tied to retaining patients for at least sixteen weeks, coupled with a performance measure that discouraged objections to the treatment model.

In that account, admissions, compensation, and restrictions on dissent were connected. The company allegedly admitted patients whose needs exceeded its capabilities, rewarded keeping them enrolled, and discouraged the judgments that could send them elsewhere.

Concerns Across the Treatment Team

The former employee says the safety concerns extended beyond his own objections. The complaint identifies meeting notes from May 6, 2025, two days before the coaching session in which he says Dr. Rapaport restricted what he could document or discuss:

83. On or about May 6, 2025, Plaintiff documented in his one-on-one meeting notes that numerous team members in weekly huddles across all verticals—including Therapy, Registered Dietitians, Peer Supports, and Family Supports—had all expressed concerns about patient safety relating to the removal of admission criteria and Defendant Equip – now Defendant Equip CO’s refusal to medically discharge patients to higher levels of care.

84. These widespread concerns across multiple disciplines confirmed that the patient safety issues Plaintiff raised were not isolated complaints but reflected systemic problems recognized throughout Defendants’ organization.

The chronology is central to the plaintiff’s account. He describes admission changes in March, a warning to Dr. La Via in April, concerns across the treatment team documented on May 6, and Dr. Rapaport’s chart instruction on May 8. His allegation concerns how supervisors responded to warnings already being raised inside the organization.

The same whispers were heard from other Equip employees. Posted quietly on social media. Undoubtedly, the fear of retribution and retaliation kept their voices from coming together. No longer.

The Licensing Warnings and the Compliance Response

The federal lawsuit also describes an earlier dispute about treating patients in states where the clinician was not licensed. He raised the issue with his supervisors, contacted licensing boards, and then took their guidance to Molly Menton, Equip’s Vice President of Quality & Compliance.

14. Within approximately one month of starting employment, Plaintiff discovered that Defendant Equip had assigned him a substantial number of patients who were located in states where Plaintiff was not yet licensed to practice.

17. In or around November 2024, Plaintiff raised concerns to his immediate supervisor, Heather Karpey, NP, and to his supervising physician, Amy Rapaport, MD, explaining that he wanted to help the organization but had concerns about liability and legal issues related to treating patients in states where he was not licensed.

18. Ms. Karpey and Dr. Rapaport directed Plaintiff to meet with Molly Menton, Vice President of Quality & Compliance, to address his concerns.

19. During his meeting with Ms. Menton, Plaintiff explained his concerns about treating patients in states where he was not licensed.

20. Ms. Menton told Plaintiff that Defendant Equip had “three levels of protection” for providers, including having a supervising physician licensed in the state where patients were located, and that Defendant Equip’s legal team had spent “countless hours” researching the licensing issues.

21. Prior to his meeting with Ms. Menton, Plaintiff had independently contacted and emailed several state Physician Assistant licensing boards to research the legal requirements.

22. Plaintiff shared with Ms. Menton that he had received guidance from state licensing boards advising against the practice of treating patients in states where the provider is not licensed.

23. On or about October 23, 2024, the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice advised Plaintiff via email: “Until you have an active medical license, the physician would need to see the patient as well. It isn’t enough for them just to attest the documentation.”

24. When Plaintiff shared this guidance with Ms. Menton, she dismissed it, stating that state licensing board staff members were “undereducated” and again emphasized the work Defendant Equip’s legal team had done to justify Defendant Equip’s practices.

25. Plaintiff asked Ms. Menton why, if the practice was “totally legal,” Defendant Equip’s compliance materials included a statement indicating that if a provider chose not to see a patient in a state where they were not licensed, Defendant Equip would honor that request and would not retaliate. [emphasis added]

26. Ms. Menton responded that if Defendant Equip wanted to terminate someone, the policy existed to “protect their butts.”

The former employee says he did more than express a generalized concern about licensing. He sought guidance from licensing boards, provided that guidance to the executive responsible for quality and compliance, and received the responses quoted above. The complaint attributes both “undereducated” and “protect their butts” to Ms. Menton.

What Patients and the Community were Led to Believe.

Separate from the lawsuit, Equip promoted its virtual program to professionals treating patients with serious eating disorders. Its referral solicitation urged providers to transition their “highest acuity” patients into “acute, virtual care.” Its website presented the program as an alternative for medically stable patients who might otherwise seek residential treatment or other intensive services. These misrepresentations make Equip’s conduct all the more reprehensible.

Equip’s public representations and the former employee’s account address the same fundamental question from opposite directions … when is treatment at home sufficient, and when does a patient need more? Equip’s public message asks patients, families, and referring professionals to trust the company’s judgment. The lawsuit alleges that a clinician’s independent, contrary medical opinion was restricted when he believed that a patient’s needed care was beyond what Equip could provide.

That is where Equip’s alleged internal conduct creates a paradigm shift for the wider eating disorder community. “Provide care for all” sounds like a commitment to access. “Trust your village” sounds like a commitment to the company. Regardless, those phrases accompanied broader admissions, financial pressure to retain patients, and limits on expressing concerns about whether the treatment was adequate.

For families, the consequences begin before any billing question. If a warning that a patient needs more intensive care does not reach the chart or the treatment team, reassuring messages may remain visible while the contrary clinical judgment does not. Parents may continue supervising meals, arranging appointments, and following a treatment plan without knowing that a professional believes the setting is inadequate. Parents may interpret deterioration as a reason to work harder at home when the missing recommendation was to obtain more intensive treatment. A family’s dedication cannot compensate for information it has not been given.

Follow the Money

The lawsuit’s financial allegations are specific. The former employee says bonuses rewarded keeping patients enrolled for at least sixteen weeks and discouraged transfers that Equip’s medical personnel believed were medically necessary. Read alongside the restrictions on documentation … that account raises the question of whether clinical information was controlled to preserve enrollment and revenue.

The question which implicates possible fraud investigation is whether clinical warnings were knowingly withheld to preserve enrollment or obtain payment on a materially misleading account of treatment. The relevant comparison is between what Equip’s clinicians believed, what they communicated internally, what appeared in patient records and authorization requests, and what patients, families, and payers were told. Supervisory notes, compensation rules, patient charts, and paid claims should be examined together.

A separate FTC complaint has already challenged Equip’s representations about treatment capacity, safety, and substitution for more intensive care. The federal lawsuit supplies a different source of allegations … a former employee’s account of internal practices and supervisory instructions. A complaint was also filed with the National Labor Relations Board.

Acquisition of public funds also warrant attention. In Texas, Superior HealthPlan’s Medicaid and CHIP resource materials direct providers to Equip. The question for a billing investigation is whether the services and treatment needs represented to payers matched what clinicians knew and recorded, including any warnings that patients required a different level of care. This complaint is also being filed and demand is being made for a thorough investigation.

Various medical boards will be asked to investigate Drs. Rapaport and La Via. Those medical boards will undoubtedly demand all records, conduct interviews, acquire Equip’s documents and demand explanations.

Consequences?

The ramifications for Equip’s misconduct and the imposition of consequences also fall on the eating disorder community at large. The fundamental questions are … Does the community’s loyalty belong to the institutions peddling care or to the patients and families depending on it? Does loyalty lie with companies which stretch legal, ethical and moral boundaries? Or does it lie with families? Will organizations and communities continue to accept Equip’s money? Will the eating disorder community continue to allow Equip to slither its way into families’ homes?

To summarize, Equip was accused by a whistleblower of engaging in the following conduct:

1. Instructing a clinician to keep warnings that patients needed more intensive treatment because of medical risk, morbidity, or mortality out of patient charts and treatment team discussions.
2. Removing admission safeguards and accepting patients whose medical needs exceeded its capabilities.
3. Tying provider bonuses to keeping patients enrolled for at least sixteen weeks, creating financial incentives to discourage medically necessary transfers.
4. Assigning patients to a clinician who lacked licenses in their states.
5. Dismissing licensing board warnings.
6. Misleading patients, families, and referring professionals about its virtual program’s ability to substitute for more intensive treatment.

If the eating disorder community does not come together and demand answers … if the community does not first and foremost protect families from harmful conduct … if the community knows of reprehensible conduct and chooses to turn away and take no action … at that point, does the community have any reason to exist?

Weight stigma is a serious issue impacting not just the medical and mental health field, but society as a whole. People in larger bodies can be mocked, stereotyped, medically dismissed, under treated and subjected to assumptions that would never be made about thinner patients.

But acknowledging a problem is not the same thing as solving it, and after years of campaigns, webinars, and social media advocacy, the question should no longer focus on whether weight stigma exists. Now, the questions must become; what has actually changed and what practical, adaptable, realistic solutions can be implemented?

That distinction matters because the weight stigma movement increasingly confuses visibility with reform. A grievance identifies a problem, awareness tells people the problem exists, and a recommendation tells someone what should happen. Implementation is much more difficult. It identifies who must act, what must change, how adoption will occur, how compliance will be measured and whether patients are actually better off.

WEIGHT STIGMA AWARENESS WEEK: SAME VOICES, SAME ROOM

Weight Stigma Awareness Week returns September 8-9 under the theme “The Power of Fat Joy.” Its website promises action planning and community, while its public engagement tools emphasize a social media toolkit, educational sessions, sharing resources, amplifying lived experience, workshops, panels, support groups, public talks and advocacy. Those activities may strengthen a movement. But they remain only movement facing activities rather than a broad implementation campaign directed at the institutions that control mainstream medical practice.

The 2026 roster reinforces the silo. The event is created and co-hosted by Wendy Oliver-Pyatt and Chevese Turner, with presenters including fat activist Sharon Maxwell and Fat Joy creator Sophia Apostol, alongside clinicians already working within weight stigma and body liberation frameworks. What the published program does not visibly provide is the audience WSAW most needs to persuade … skeptical primary care physicians, obesity medicine specialists prepared to challenge its premises, medical school curriculum leaders, hospital executives, accrediting bodies, licensing authorities and mainstream medical societies prepared to test the movement’s recommendations against competing evidence and institutional reality.

A movement cannot credibly claim to be transforming mainstream healthcare while primarily speaking to people already disposed to agree with it. Awareness directed at the already aware produces echo chamber reinforcement, not persuasion, and the applause inside the room grows louder while influence outside the room becomes weaker. If the objective is to change medicine, the difficult audience is the physician who is unconvinced, the dean guarding a finite curriculum, the hospital administrator demanding evidence and the professional organization that must reconcile anti-stigma principles with legitimate obesity treatment.

WHEN THE MESSENGER BECOMES BIGGER THAN THE MESSAGE

To exacerbate matters, a reform movement begins to lose the import of its message when the personality, politics and ideological rigidity of its messengers become more visible than the problem they are trying to solve. When persuasion gives way to purity tests, disagreement is treated as disloyalty and prospective allies are required to accept an entire worldview before they are permitted to support the underlying cause. This is how messenger becomes an obstacle to the message itself.

Chevese Turner epitomizes this reality by turning a potentially broad healthcare message into an ideological test. She has publicly described this work as “social justice, rooted in policy, very political” and declared that “there is no room for neutrality.”

Weight stigma does not belong to Ms. Turner, fat activism or any political faction. The proposition that larger patients deserve competent and respectful medical care should be capable of uniting eating disorder clinicians, obesity specialists, primary care physicians, conservatives, progressives, people taking GLP-1 medications, people opposed to intentional weight loss and people with no interest in body politics at all. They do not have to agree about these topics to agree that patients should not be humiliated, stereotyped, ignored or denied competent medical care because of their size.

Yet some of the most ideological corners of the movement increasingly appear to demand something approaching complete agreement rather than building coalitions around areas of common ground. The experience of Lindo Bacon is difficult to ignore. Bacon was one of the most recognizable popularizers of Health at Every Size, and ASDAH itself acknowledged that many, if not most, people associated HAES with Bacon. Nevertheless, in 2022 ASDAH publicly accused Bacon of conduct reflecting “white fragility,” “white supremacy culture,” “performative allyship” and “power hoarding,” revoked Bacon’s membership, barred Bacon from ASDAH events, opposed publication of a revised Health at Every Size book and asked Bacon to relinquish HAES related resources. Whatever one’s conclusions about their underlying dispute, that episode demonstrated how completely a movement can turn on even one of its most recognizable advocates when ideological and organizational boundaries change.

That sends an unmistakable message to people standing outside the movement. If someone as closely identified with HAES as Bacon can ultimately be declared unacceptable, what confidence should an obesity physician, pediatrician, bariatric surgeon, researcher or medical educator have that partial agreement will be welcomed? A clinician may strongly oppose weight discrimination while continuing to believe obesity can present medical risks. A physician may treat every patient with dignity while prescribing semaglutide. A researcher may question BMI while declining to demand its abolition. If disagreement on those secondary questions subjects prospective allies to accusations of bias or ideological failure, the movement is not enlarging its coalition; it is compressing it.

This is where ideological purity becomes strategically self-defeating. An effective reform movement does not require every prospective ally to agree with 100 percent of its worldview. It identifies the 60, 70 or 80 percent on which agreement is possible and builds outward from there. A movement that rejects its 80 percent allies eventually becomes a movement populated almost exclusively by its 100 percent believers. That may create ideological consistency, but it also creates an echo chamber and sharply limits the movement’s ability to change institutions populated by people who do not already share its assumptions.

There is empirical reason to take that danger seriously. Research on what scholars have called the “activist’s dilemma” found across six experiments that extreme activist tactics diminish public support not merely for the activists but, in most of the studies, for the underlying cause itself. When moderates are marginalized, expelled or treated as insufficiently committed, the radical flank is no longer merely one part of the movement. To outsiders it increasingly becomes the movement.

Turner’s “no room for neutrality” posture becomes especially problematic in that environment because neutrality is precisely where persuasion begins. The neutral physician, legislator or medical educator is not an enemy. That person is the prospective ally who has not yet been convinced. Ironically, Turner has also spoken about humility, curiosity, psychological flexibility and listening to understand. But those principles are difficult to reconcile with a political framework in which neutrality itself is unacceptable. An invitation to listen loses much of its value if the listener is ultimately expected to arrive at a predetermined ideological destination.

The danger is that disagreement gradually becomes recast as evidence of the very bias the movement is attempting to prove. A physician who questions one component of the ideology can be dismissed as fatphobic. Resistance becomes evidence of anti-fat bias. Criticism confirms the diagnosis, and the circle becomes increasingly difficult to penetrate from outside. Leaders surrounded primarily by sycophants who share the same assumptions have progressively less exposure to serious counterarguments and less incentive to reconsider whether their tactics are actually persuading anyone.

That is when the messenger becomes bigger than the message. Instead of asking whether larger patients are treated fairly, outsiders begin asking whether they want to associate themselves with Turner, ASDAH, fat liberation, opposition to intentional weight loss, or a broader social justice ideology. A straightforward question of dignity and competent healthcare becomes fused with an entire political and cultural identity that millions of otherwise persuadable people never agreed to adopt.

The irony is difficult to escape. Weight stigma is fundamentally concerned with the harmful consequences of stereotyping, exclusion and judgment. Yet the most ideologically rigid elements of the movement are creating their own system of exclusion in which people who agree with the central objective but question parts of the prevailing doctrine are treated as insufficiently enlightened, insufficiently committed or even part of the problem.

And the people who ultimately bear the cost are not the activists engaged in these ideological battles. They are larger-bodied patients encountering genuine stigma in physicians’ offices, hospitals, workplaces and everyday life. Every obesity specialist who might have supported better medical training, every legislator who might have supported weight discrimination protections, every physician who might have reconsidered unconscious bias and every member of the public who might have been persuaded represents a potential ally. Driving those people away in pursuit of ideological purity does nothing to reduce the stigma those patients actually experience.

REAL REFORM REQUIRES MACHINERY, NOT SLOGANS

A workable reform begins by defining the harmful conduct behaviorally rather than ideologically. Humiliating treatment must stop, unsupported assumptions about eating or activity based solely on body size should stop, symptoms should not be attributed to weight without an appropriate diagnostic evaluation, and medical environments should contain equipment that can safely accommodate the patients they serve. Those are specific problems capable of specific remedies.

But even sensible recommendations accomplish little unless they are adopted into systems that resist change. A medical school reform needs a defined competency, curriculum placement, faculty responsibility, assessment and some mechanism that causes adoption, whether legislation, accreditation pressure, examination content or institutional mandate. A clinical screening reform needs a validated instrument, an identified patient population, an EHR workflow, referral criteria, clinician training and an audit showing whether diagnosis and treatment improved. Anyone who has tried to add a new requirement to medical education quickly discovers that the hard part is not persuading people that a subject is important. The hard part is persuading institutions to surrender scarce time, alter established processes and accept accountability for the result.

This is where fifteen years of awareness become difficult to defend as progress. WSAW’s own current action materials remain dominated by social media campaigns, panels, conversations, self-reflection, storytelling and advocacy. Those activities may tangentially support implementation, but they are not substitutes for it. After enough years, repeatedly telling other people what they should do without constructing a realistic mechanism by which they will actually do it becomes a cycle of complaint, recommendation and renewed complaint.

EATING DISORDERS CANNOT BE HELD HOSTAGE TO BODY POLITICS

The eating disorder field has legitimate reasons to challenge simplistic assumptions about weight. Restrictive eating can be medically dangerous without producing an emaciated appearance, and a larger patient can have anorexia or another serious eating disorder that clinicians miss because the patient does not fit an old stereotype. At the same time, recognizing weight stigma does not require pretending that weight can never be medically relevant, that obesity medicine is inherently discriminatory or that intentional weight reduction is always pathological.

The workable principle is far less ideological … body size is information, not a diagnosis. A patient with abdominal pain deserves a diagnostic workup rather than an automatic lecture about weight. A patient with diabetes may have legitimate reasons to discuss weight management. A teenager who has lost substantial weight through severe restriction may be medically unstable despite a higher BMI. Patients do not arrive in political categories, and clinicians should not have to filter them through diet culture, fat liberation, HAES or obesity-medicine orthodoxy before exercising individualized clinical judgment.

The same principle applies psychologically. Some patients benefit from body acceptance or body positivity, while others may find body neutrality more realistic. The objective is not to make the body a permanent political identity but to allow it eventually to occupy less psychological space. Recovery should enlarge a person’s life, not replace one form of relentless body preoccupation with another.

FIFTEEN YEARS IS ENOUGH TIME TO ASK WHAT CHANGED

Weight stigma is real, and that should be the beginning of the difficult conversation rather than the movement’s permanent conclusion. Every proposed reform should have to answer five questions:

1. What conduct are we changing?
2. What replaces it?
3. Who has the authority and incentive to implement the replacement?
4.  How will adoption and compliance be measured?
5.  And are patients actually better off?

A movement that cannot answer those questions may have identified a grievance, not built a solution.

Weight Stigma Awareness Week’s 2026 program reveals why this distinction matters. The same ideological ecosystem again gathers around the same themes, the same vocabulary, the same voices and many of the same forms of activism. The public facing strategy remains weighted toward storytelling, discussion and advocacy rather than the institutions and mechanisms capable of producing broad medical change.

After fifteen years, awareness is no longer a sufficient defense. If the same problems return year after year while the principal response remains another event explaining why the problems matter, it is logical to conclude the movement may have become adept at describing weight stigma without demonstrating that it knows how to solve it at scale.

Medicine needs fewer ideological litmus tests and fewer conversations among the already converted. It needs workable reforms that survive disagreement, penetrate resistant institutions and produce measurable improvements in patient care.

In the eating disorder community, that requires collaboration among professionals, breaking away from business as usual and focusing on one fundamental ideal upon which all in the community should embrace 100% … the first priority must be the families who are suffering.

Dr. Wendy Oliver-Pyatt, Chevese Turner, and the Eating Disorders Education Institute (“EDEI”) are aggressively promoting EDCS to clinicians as a professional credential reflecting specialized eating disorder knowledge, clinical readiness and professional development. EDEI wants clinicians to spend thousands of dollars obtaining the designation and then place the initials after their names, where employers, referral sources, patients and families may reasonably interpret them as evidence of specialized competence. A credential intended to carry that kind of professional significance necessarily depends upon trust in both the credential and the organization issuing it.

That trust should not be difficult to establish if EDEI has built what it claims to have built. Yet serious questions have repeatedly been raised concerning the meaning and validation of EDCS, EDEI’s ownership and financial independence, the manner in which insiders obtained the credential before general availability, EDEI’s extensive connections with Within Health, the authority exercised by its President Ms. Turner, and whether Ms. Turner’s openly political philosophy can be separated from a credentialing process that includes subjective evaluation of clinicians. Some of these questions have previously been asked. Meaningful answers have not followed.

The following questions are not demands that Dr. Oliver-Pyatt or Ms. Turner agree with their critics. Most of the questions concern facts almost entirely within EDEI’s possession, including its ownership, financing, standards, validation, scoring, conflicts, credentialing files and governance. An organization asking to evaluate the competence and judgment of other professionals should be willing to permit meaningful scrutiny of its own competence, judgment and independence.

So, the inquiry can be reduced to fifteen fundamental questions.

1. What, precisely does EDCS establish?

EDEI has described EDCS in terms suggesting specialized knowledge, clinical readiness, mastery and applied clinical skill, while also using language disclaiming any guarantee of clinical competence or expert-level status. Those propositions need to be reconciled because patients and employers will not parse the legal nuances of EDEI’s website. When a clinician places EDCS after a name, what exactly does EDEI represent that those four letters establish, and what should a patient, employer or referral source reasonably understand them to mean?

2. Who independently recognizes EDEI’s authority to determine who qualifies as an eating disorder specialist?

EDEI created EDCS and now asks an established professional community to recognize the resulting designation. Has any independent medical specialty board, state licensing authority, university, established credentialing organization or independent accrediting body reviewed the finished program and formally recognized EDCS as a valid measure of specialized eating disorder competence? If no such organization has done so, EDEI should explain the basis upon which it believes the field should confer that authority upon EDEI itself.

3. What exactly did the Delphi process validate?

Dr. Oliver-Pyatt has described EDEI’s Delphi study as identifying 157 priority areas “to guide the curriculum.” Identifying subjects that experts believe should be taught is not necessarily the same thing as validating the curriculum subsequently written, the examination, a passing score, the live practicum or the finished professional credential. EDEI should identify precisely what the Delphi process established and explain the scientific basis for describing the resulting program or credential as “Delphi-validated.”

4. Where is the independent psychometric validation of EDCS?

A professional credential intended to distinguish specialist competence ordinarily requires defensible methods for identifying competencies, constructing assessments, establishing passing standards and determining whether the instrument reliably measures what the organization says it measures. Did EDEI conduct a formal job-task or competency analysis, examination validation, cut-score study, reliability analysis, item-discrimination analysis or comparable psychometric work? If so, EDEI should identify the independent experts who performed that work and publish sufficient results to permit the profession to evaluate the credential’s validity.

5. Why have EDEI’s published requirements for the same credential conflicted?

EDEI materials have described different numbers of required courses and different numbers of live practicum hours for apparently identical EDCS pathways. That is not an insignificant typographical issue when live practicum is promoted as a distinguishing feature demonstrating applied clinical ability. EDEI should state the actual requirements, explain when and why they changed, and identify which requirements were applied to every individual who obtained EDCS before the program became generally available.

6. If live practicum demonstrates clinical readiness, why can some applicants receive the same EDCS designation without completing it?

EDEI has emphasized practicum as a feature distinguishing its program from ordinary continuing education, yet its Direct pathway permits qualifying professionals to receive the same EDCS designation without completing the ordinary live-practicum requirement. If practicum is necessary to establish applied competence for one clinician, EDEI should explain why it is unnecessary for another clinician receiving precisely the same letters and what evidence demonstrates that the two pathways produce equivalent credential holders.

7. How did Dr. Oliver-Pyatt, EDEI instructors and other insiders obtain EDCS before ordinary clinicians could complete the publicly advertised program?

This should have an exceptionally simple documentary answer. EDEI can identify the courses completed by each pre-launch credential holder, examinations or assessments taken, practicum requirements satisfied, evaluator involved, passing standard applied, fees paid, waivers granted and person or independent authority who approved the credential. If insiders received substantially different treatment from the clinicians now being asked to purchase EDCS, the profession deserves to know that before assigning meaning to the designation.

8. Who owns EDEI, who financed its development and what does Turner’s representation that it was built entirely “out of pocket” actually mean?

Ms. Turner publicly stated that EDEI has no corporate owner, no outside investors, no venture capital funding and that its founders “did it all ourselves out of pocket.” That statement is factual and readily verifiable. EDEI should identify every owner of the entity through which it operates, every ownership percentage, every capital contribution and loan, and every affiliated organization that supplied employees, technology, marketing, legal work, administration, intellectual property, course development or other services of value.

9. What resources, personnel or services has Within Health supplied to EDEI?

Dr. Oliver-Pyatt leads both EDEI and Within Health, Ms. Turner has previously been identified as a Within advisor, and current Within clinical personnel teach through EDEI. The significant question is therefore not whether the entities have different legal names but how separate they are operationally. EDEI should disclose whether Within has provided compensated employee time, technology, administrative services, marketing, curriculum assistance, professional contacts, software, intellectual property or other resources, and whether EDEI pays fair value for any such assistance.

10. Who financially benefits if EDCS becomes widely accepted?

EDEI is a commercial enterprise charging substantial amounts for credentialing pathways, and the value of the business necessarily increases if EDCS becomes recognized by clinicians, employers, treatment organizations and patients. EDEI should disclose its projected enrollment, revenues and renewal income, identify the individuals entitled to profits, and explain whether affiliated treatment companies stand to obtain additional professional or commercial benefits when their clinicians display a credential created by an organization connected to the same founder.

11. What did Chevese Turner mean when she said this work is “very political” and that “there is no room for neutrality”?

Ms. Turner has described the work as “social justice, rooted in policy, very political” and said there is “no room for neutrality.” Those words require explanation when the speaker is not merely an activist participating in the program but the President of an organization proposing to evaluate licensed professionals. EDEI should state whether Ms. Turner’s description represents its institutional philosophy and identify precisely whether political or social-justice concepts influence curriculum requirements, practicum scoring, candidate evaluation or credentialing decisions.

12. Can a clinically competent applicant reject HAES, weight neutrality, body liberation, intersectionality or social-justice theory and still receive EDCS?

The issue is not whether clinicians should understand these frameworks. A professional may understand a theory thoroughly while disagreeing with its premises or rejecting it as the governing framework for patient care. EDEI should state unequivocally whether a clinician can disagree with Ms. Turner and EDEI concerning these contested approaches and nevertheless earn EDCS solely by demonstrating defensible medical, psychological or nutritional competence. If the answer is yes, that protection should appear expressly in EDEI’s written credentialing rules.

13. What actual authority does Turner possess over clinicians seeking EDCS?

EDEI has described Ms. Turner as leading efforts to educate and credential providers, but the limits of her authority have not been made sufficiently clear. EDEI should disclose whether Turner can approve curriculum, select instructors or practicum evaluators, see candidate identities, review candidate assessments, influence passing decisions, participate in appeals, investigate complaints, modify credentialing requirements or participate in credential revocation. That information becomes especially important given Ms. Turner’s extensive public record of political advocacy, distrust of aspects of the medical establishment and confrontational treatment of some people she regarded as professional adversaries.

14. What independent safeguards protect applicants from evaluator bias?

A live practicum necessarily involves judgment, and subjective judgment creates the possibility of conscious or unconscious bias regardless of an evaluator’s political philosophy. EDEI should publish the practicum scoring rubric, identify objective passing and failure criteria, disclose whether inter-rater reliability has been tested, explain mandatory conflict and recusal procedures, and identify the appellate process available to a clinician who believes political, ideological, professional or personal disagreement affected an evaluation. Most importantly, EDEI should disclose whether any appeal ultimately reaches a person or body genuinely independent of EDEI leadership.

15. Will EDEI submit the finished EDCS program to genuinely independent review and disclose the results?

This question ultimately encompasses almost all the others. Will EDEI provide qualified independent reviewers with its ownership and related-party information, complete Delphi methodology, competency framework, examination blueprint, psychometric analyses, passing standards, practicum rubric, evaluator training procedures, conflicts policies, appeals system and records showing how pre-launch credential holders obtained EDCS? If EDEI believes EDCS represents a legitimate professional standard, independent scrutiny should strengthen the credential rather than threaten it.

These Questions Should Be Easy to Answer

Eating disorder education desperately needs improvement, and an organization capable of providing rigorous education could make an important contribution to the field. That need, however, does not establish the validity of a privately created professional credential, nor does it excuse the organization issuing that credential from ordinary expectations of transparency, independent validation and freedom from conflicts.

The questions above do not require disclosure of trade secrets or confidential patient information. They ask what EDCS means, who independently validated it, how insiders obtained it, who owns and financed the enterprise, what relationships exist with affiliated treatment businesses, what authority its President exercises, whether applicants may disagree with her political philosophy, and what safeguards protect credentialing decisions from bias. Those are precisely the subjects a professional organization should expect clinicians to examine before paying thousands of dollars for a designation and placing it beside their professional licenses and degrees.

EDEI and its leadership are invited to answer all fifteen questions publicly, and any substantive answers should be made available so clinicians, patients and families can evaluate the responses for themselves. If a particular question rests upon an incorrect premise, EDEI should identify the error and produce the facts correcting it. Transparency does not require agreement with critics; it requires a willingness to answer legitimate questions with verifiable information.

If EDEI again chooses not to respond, that silence should not necessarily be characterized as proof that every criticism of the organization is correct. It does, however, become relevant evidence concerning institutional transparency. A credentialing organization that expects clinicians to submit their education, judgment and professional competence to EDEI’s scrutiny should reasonably be expected to submit EDEI’s own standards, governance and conflicts to scrutiny in return.

The eating disorder community does not have to decide today whether EDCS is a good credential or a bad one. It first needs enough information to determine what EDCS actually is, what evidence supports it and whether the organization issuing it deserves the authority it is attempting to exercise. These fifteen questions provide EDEI with an uncomplicated opportunity to supply that information, and if its leadership continues to decline that opportunity, clinicians should take that refusal into account before entrusting EDEI with their money, professional reputation or confidence.

Eating disorders have traditionally been grouped according to what patients do. A person restricts food. Another binges. Someone purges. Still others exercise compulsively. A patient becomes dangerously underweight. Another lives in a larger body while experiencing episodes of uncontrollable eating. Clinicians understandably focus on these behaviors because they are the immediate manifestations of the illness and, in some cases, can become life-threatening. Now, genetics is beginning to help us understand some of the biology that may help explain why those patterns develop.

A major international genetic study published on August 19, 2026, in Nature Mental Health analyzed genetic data involving more than 24,000 people with anorexia nervosa and more than 39,000 people identified as having binge-eating behavior across several datasets, together with more than one million comparison participants in each analysis. Researchers from around the world participated, including investigators from the University of Otago in Christchurch, New Zealand.

That study can be found here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-026-00698-2.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com

The findings do not give us a genetic test for an eating disorder, identify an “anorexia gene” or “binge-eating gene,” or establish that environment, trauma, dieting, culture or psychological experiences are unimportant.

What the findings do reveal may be more consequential. The study strengthens the evidence that anorexia and binge-eating behavior involve numerous genetic influences and that these seemingly different presentations can share important underlying vulnerabilities while diverging substantially in other areas of biology. Perhaps most importantly, the findings provide additional evidence that eating disorder biology cannot simply be reduced to the biology of being thin, being heavier or having a particular body mass index. That distinction could eventually change how eating disorders are understood, classified and treated.

What Does a Genetic Study Like This Actually Tell Us?

The study is what scientists call a genome-wide association study, or GWAS. The concept is easier to understand than the terminology. Human beings share almost all their DNA, but millions of small genetic differences exist among us. Researchers can compare very large groups of people with and without a particular illness or behavior and ask whether certain genetic variations appear more frequently in one group than another. With sufficiently large numbers, patterns begin to emerge.

Researchers generally are not finding one gene that causes an eating disorder. Eating disorders appear to be polygenic, meaning many genetic variations, each usually contributing only a very small amount of risk, interact with one another and with a person’s biology, development and environment. A useful way to think about genetic vulnerability is as hundreds or thousands of tiny weights placed on a scale. No single weight determines the outcome, but together they can influence susceptibility. That is why someone can carry substantial genetic risk and never develop an eating disorder, while another person with genetic vulnerability may develop one when that vulnerability interacts with other biological, psychological or environmental factors. Genes are not destiny, but neither are they irrelevant background information.

Anorexia and Binge Eating Share Something Important

One of the study’s most interesting findings is that anorexia nervosa and binge-eating behavior share a meaningful amount of genetic vulnerability. At first, that may seem surprising. Anorexia and binge eating can appear almost opposite. One may involve severe restriction, while the other involves episodes of eating accompanied by loss of control. Anorexia is often associated with very low weight, while binge eating occurs across the weight spectrum and is frequently associated with higher weight. Yet their genetics suggest that they are not completely unrelated.

The researchers found a moderate genetic relationship between anorexia and binge eating, while additional modeling suggested substantial overlap among genetic variants contributing to susceptibility to the two phenotypes. At the same time, important differences emerged. Binge eating showed stronger genetic relationships with ADHD, smoking, problematic alcohol use and general risk tolerance. Anorexia showed a different pattern, including a stronger genetic relationship with obsessive-compulsive disorder and the unusual combination seen in previous research of psychiatric, metabolic and body-composition associations.

These findings must be interpreted carefully. They do not mean that binge eating is simply a problem of impulse control or that everyone who binges has ADHD, abuses alcohol or engages in risky behavior. Nor do they mean that everyone with anorexia has OCD. These are population-level genetic relationships suggesting that some biological systems involved in these other traits may overlap with systems affecting susceptibility to eating disorder behaviors.

The findings may also help explain something clinicians routinely observe. Eating disorders do not always remain neatly within diagnostic boundaries. A person may severely restrict at one stage of illness and later develop binge or purge symptoms. Another may move between diagnoses over time. Binge eating itself can occur in binge-eating disorder, bulimia nervosa and some presentations of anorexia nervosa. At least some of that clinical overlap may eventually prove to reflect shared biology rather than simply changing behavior.

Eating Disorders Are Not Simply Disorders of Body Weight

One of the study’s most important analyses involved BMI. Because anorexia is frequently associated with very low body weight and binge eating is often associated with higher weight, the researchers asked whether their genetic findings were essentially detecting genes related to body size rather than genes related to the eating-disorder phenotypes themselves. The answer was largely no.

For binge-eating behavior, the genetic component shared with BMI accounted for about 12 percent of the genetic variation being modeled, while approximately 88 percent remained in a component not shared with BMI. For anorexia nervosa, the BMI-shared component accounted for approximately 10 percent, while about 90 percent remained in the non-BMI component.

Those numbers require careful explanation. They do not mean that 90 percent of anorexia is genetic, that weight is unimportant in anorexia, or that 90 percent of the causes of anorexia have nothing to do with body weight. They mean something much more specific: when researchers examined the genetic signals associated with anorexia, most could not simply be explained by genetics associated with having a lower BMI. The same principle applied to binge eating and higher BMI.

The researchers concluded that their findings were not simply “BMI studies by proxy.” That is a significant distinction because weight can be a critically important manifestation of an eating disorder without being an adequate explanation for the disease itself.

Being Naturally Thin Is Not the Same Thing as Having Anorexia

Another finding reinforces that point. Researchers compared anorexia with persistent thinness, meaning people who remain naturally very thin but do not have anorexia nervosa, and found no significant genetic overlap between persistent thinness and anorexia.

Clinically, this may seem obvious, but biologically it matters. Imagine two people with similarly low body weights. One eats normally, does not fear weight gain, does not compulsively restrict and has always been naturally thin. The other has anorexia nervosa and experiences restriction, fear, rigidity, compulsive behaviors or other features of the illness. Their bodies may look similar, but that does not mean the underlying biology is the same.

The finding also reinforces why clinicians should be cautious about defining restrictive eating disorders by weight alone. A person with atypical anorexia nervosa can experience severe restriction, psychological symptoms and significant medical compromise without ever reaching a conventionally underweight BMI. The disease is not simply the number on the scale.

Anorexia Is Looking Increasingly Like an Illness of Both the Brain and the Body

This study builds upon an important finding from major anorexia genetics research published in 2019. That earlier work found genetic relationships not only between anorexia and psychiatric conditions, but also with metabolic characteristics, physical activity and body composition. The researchers proposed reconsidering anorexia as a “metabo-psychiatric” disorder, meaning an illness involving both psychiatric and metabolic biology.

The new study strengthens that broader concept. Our traditional understanding of anorexia can become too linear: a person develops psychological problems, those problems cause restriction, restriction causes starvation and starvation then causes metabolic abnormalities. Some of that unquestionably occurs because starvation profoundly affects virtually every organ system, including the brain.

However, genetics raises another possibility. Some metabolic characteristics may contribute to a person’s vulnerability to anorexia rather than existing only as consequences of starvation. That does not mean metabolism causes anorexia. It means that brain function, behavior, appetite, energy regulation, activity and metabolism may be considerably more intertwined than our traditional categories have suggested. If that proves correct, the implications for treatment could eventually be substantial.

Why Can Recovery Be So Difficult?

Families often encounter one of the most painful mysteries of eating disorders. A person may understand intellectually that the illness is dangerous, know that they need nutrition and desperately want their life back, yet remain unable to eat adequately, tolerate weight restoration, stop exercising or resist the behaviors of the illness. From outside the disease, this can be extraordinarily difficult to understand.

Genetic research does not yet tell us exactly why this happens, but it gives us another reason to reject simplistic explanations based on stubbornness, vanity, defiance or lack of motivation. If eating disorder vulnerability involves biological systems affecting anxiety, compulsivity, reward, appetite, activity, metabolism or behavioral control, then a patient may be experiencing pressures that neither the patient nor the clinician can currently measure. A person can rationally understand something and still have powerful biological systems pushing in another direction.

The emerging genetics do not yet explain treatment resistance or recovery at the individual level. What they provide is a biological framework within which researchers may eventually understand these clinical experiences much better.

The Future May Be Less About “Which Eating Disorder?” and More About “Which Version?”

This may be the most important long-term implication of the research. Today, diagnosis is based primarily on symptoms. Two patients who meet diagnostic criteria for anorexia nervosa receive the same diagnosis, yet those two people may be remarkably different. One may have pronounced anxiety and obsessive-compulsive characteristics. Another may have an unusually strong drive for physical activity. Another may have prominent metabolic features, while another repeatedly moves between restriction and binge or purge behaviors.

What if some of those differences reflect more than personality or presentation? What if they represent different biological pathways leading to what we currently call the same disorder? This study does not identify such biological subtypes today, but it points toward a research direction in which they may eventually become identifiable. The researchers themselves raise the possibility that genetics could someday contribute to a more biologically informed classification of eating disorders.

Medicine has undergone similar transformations elsewhere. Cancer provides an imperfect but useful comparison. Modern oncology increasingly examines molecular differences among tumors because two people with cancer in the same organ may have diseases that respond very differently to treatment. Eating disorders are nowhere near that level of precision, but the same conceptual possibility is important.

Imagine a future in which two patients with anorexia are no longer automatically assumed to have biologically identical illnesses simply because they satisfy the same diagnostic checklist. Treatment might eventually consider which biological systems appear most involved in each person’s disease. That is the promise of precision medicine.

Such a change could affect psychotherapy, medication development and clinical trials. A patient whose illness is strongly associated with rigidity and compulsivity may eventually benefit from a different therapeutic emphasis than someone whose dominant vulnerability involves reward processing or emotional regulation. Researchers testing medications may also become better able to identify subgroups who respond to treatments that appear ineffective when everyone with the same diagnosis is analyzed together. These are possibilities, not findings established by this study, but they are reasonable directions suggested by a growing body of biological research.

Could Genetics Lead to New Medications?

Potentially, although not immediately. The study identified several regions of DNA associated with anorexia and binge-eating behavior. For binge eating, one of the strongest associations involved the region around FTO, a gene long connected with body weight. The researchers raised the possibility that part of FTO’s relationship with higher BMI could involve eating behavior itself.

For anorexia, researchers confirmed several previously identified regions and identified additional ones. They also found evidence involving genes participating in neuronal RNA processing and alternative splicing. These are starting points, not treatments. Finding a genetic region associated with an illness does not mean scientists have discovered “the gene” responsible for it. Researchers still must determine what biological process is being affected, how that process influences illness and whether it can be safely altered.

The genetic analysis also pointed toward biological targets associated with a class of anti-migraine medications, consistent with previous genetic relationships between migraine and anorexia. But no one should read this study and conclude that migraine medication has been established as a treatment for anorexia. It has not.

The importance of such findings is that genetics may provide leads. Over time, those leads could help researchers identify biological pathways that might be targeted with new or repurposed medications. That possibility is especially important in anorexia, where medication development has lagged far behind many other serious psychiatric illnesses.

Could We Eventually Identify People at Risk Earlier?

Again possibly, but we are not there yet. Researchers can combine thousands of genetic differences into what is called a polygenic risk score. The goal is to estimate inherited susceptibility by looking at many small genetic signals rather than searching for a single causative gene.

The scores used in this study could statistically distinguish some people at greater risk, but their predictive power remains far too weak for routine clinical use. There is currently no useful genetic screening test for anorexia or binge eating. Parents should not buy commercial genetic tests expecting them to determine whether their child will develop an eating disorder, and clinicians should not make treatment decisions based on such testing.

The future could be different. Risk assessment might someday combine family history, genetic susceptibility, early eating behaviors, anxiety or compulsivity, metabolic characteristics, changes in growth, activity patterns, developmental factors and other warning signs. No single factor would have to predict an eating disorder. Together, they might eventually help clinicians identify some vulnerable people earlier, before the illness becomes deeply entrenched.

The Research is Important for Families

One consequence of biological research has nothing to do with technology. It concerns blame. Families were once directly blamed for causing eating disorders, particularly anorexia. Modern treatment has moved a considerable distance from those theories, but parents and loved ones can still carry enormous guilt.

Genetic research provides another reason to reject the idea that a parent simply caused a child’s anorexia by saying the wrong thing, serving the wrong food or creating the wrong family environment. At the same time, genetics should not create a different form of fatalism. A genetic vulnerability does not mean recovery is impossible.

Genes influence risk. They do not write an unavoidable script. A family history of heart disease does not guarantee that someone will die of heart disease, and genetic vulnerability to depression does not make depression untreatable. The same principle applies here. Biology can create vulnerability while nutrition, medical care, psychotherapy, family support, relationships and environment can still profoundly affect what happens. For families, perhaps the most important message is to take the illness seriously without treating it as the patient’s fault or anyone else’s.

What This Study Does Not Prove

The excitement surrounding this research requires boundaries. The study does not prove that eating disorders are “genetic diseases” in the simple sense that Huntington’s disease or cystic fibrosis are genetic diseases. Eating disorders involve many genes interacting with development and environment. Nor does it establish that sociocultural influences are irrelevant. A genetically vulnerable brain still develops in a social environment, and dieting, trauma, bullying, weight stigma, cultural expectations and other experiences can matter.

The study also does not establish that current treatments are misguided. Nutritional rehabilitation, psychotherapy, medical monitoring and family support remain central components of care. Nor does the research provide a clinically useful genetic test or a newly proven medication.

There are important limitations in who was studied. The principal genetic analyses involved people of European ancestry because sufficiently large datasets from other populations were not available, which limits how confidently the findings can be generalized to other populations. The samples were also overwhelmingly female, with approximately 96 percent of the binge-eating group and 94 percent of the anorexia group being female. The researchers found some indication that genetic risk identified in females also applies to males, but there were too few male participants to determine whether male eating disorders have distinctive genetic characteristics. That limitation matters in a field that has historically underdiagnosed and understudied boys and men.

Finally, the binge-eating analysis was broader than a study of formally diagnosed binge-eating disorder. Participants were identified through several datasets and definitions of binge-eating behavior. The findings therefore should not be described as though they apply exclusively to people with a formal diagnosis of binge-eating disorder.

What Changes Today?

Clinicians should not change treatment protocols because of this study alone. There is no new genetic test to order, no newly established medication to prescribe and no genetic result that tells a family which therapy will work. What should continue to change is our understanding of the illness.

The scientific evidence increasingly argues against viewing an eating disorder primarily as a problem of food, weight, body image or social influence with biology added as an afterthought. The emerging model is considerably broader. Eating disorders appear to involve complicated interactions among inherited vulnerability, brain function, psychiatric characteristics, metabolism, development and environment.

The visible behaviors remain critically important. Restriction must be interrupted. Malnutrition must be treated. Purging must be addressed. Binge eating must be understood and treated. Medical instability requires medical care. But those behaviors may be surface manifestations of biological systems that differ substantially among patients.

That possibility should change the questions we ask. Instead of only asking why a patient will not eat, we may eventually understand which biological systems make eating so threatening or difficult. Instead of asking why someone cannot stop binge eating, we may better understand how appetite, reward and behavioral control systems are interacting. Instead of wondering why treatment worked for one person and failed another, we may discover that the two patients never had biologically identical illnesses in the first place.

The old argument over whether eating disorders are psychological or biological may itself become increasingly obsolete. The brain is biological. Psychological experience can change biology. Genes influence behavior. Environment influences biology. Starvation changes the brain. Metabolism communicates with the brain. These systems interact.

A Different Way of Seeing the Patient

Perhaps the most immediate value of this research is not a medication, a genetic test or a new diagnostic category. It is perspective. Eating disorders can produce behaviors that bewilder experienced clinicians and terrify families. A patient may resist the very nutrition needed to keep them alive. Someone may repeatedly engage in behavior they desperately want to stop. Intelligence, love, logic and fear of consequences can all seem insufficient to overcome the illness.

Genetics does not explain every one of those experiences, but the expanding evidence increasingly tells us that we are looking at disease, not simply difficult behavior. The Nature Mental Health study is not the final answer to what causes anorexia or binge eating. It may eventually be remembered as one step in a much larger scientific transition, away from defining eating disorders almost entirely by what patients do and toward understanding the biological processes that make those behaviors so difficult to change.

That transition may ultimately matter far more than discovering any single gene. The real promise of genetics is not that medicine will someday tell a patient, “We found your eating disorder gene.” The more meaningful possibility is that medicine may someday be able to say something far more useful: we understand much more about the particular form of this illness affecting you, and because we understand it better, we know much more precisely how to treat it.

Inclusion and Gender Equality Means Cisgender Boys and Men are not Allowed.

The Renfrew Center presents itself as an “inclusive” eating disorder treatment system. Its website says eating disorders affect people regardless of gender, describes diversity as something to be celebrated, advertises specialized programming for historically marginalized populations, and tells prospective patients that cost should not prevent access to care.

However, its admissions policy contradicts that message. “Inclusion” ends at the admission door.

Renfrew offers treatment to “cisgender adolescent girls and women,” “transgender adolescents and adults,” and “gender non-binary adolescents and adults.” The missing element? Cisgender boys and men. A biological male who identifies as a woman can qualify for admission, as can a transgender man or nonbinary patient, while a biological male who identifies as a man cannot.

This is not an ambiguity buried in an outdated brochure. Renfrew has defined the categories itself and continues to publish them under the heading “Expert Care for All.” What Renfrew failed to do is to say that its “Expert Care for All” specifically excludes boys and men. Unless of course you are transgender or non-binary. The hypocrisy is appalling.

The Excluded Population Is Substantial

This exclusion cannot be defended as affecting some negligible fraction of the eating disorder population. The American Psychological Association reports that boys and men account for approximately one third of people diagnosed with eating disorders and describes the long history of male patients being overlooked because these illnesses were treated culturally and clinically as diseases of girls and women. Male patients were underrepresented in research, screening instruments frequently reflected female presentations, and diagnostic criteria historically incorporated assumptions tied to female biology.

Renfrew emerged from that history. When it opened in 1985, the organization was built around the treatment of women and girls, a model consistent with the prevailing view of eating disorders at the time. Scientific understanding changed, and Renfrew expanded its admission categories, but it did so without correcting the exclusion of cisgender males.

The resulting policy is more difficult to justify than Renfrew’s original women only model. Renfrew no longer limits treatment to women, nor does it limit admission according to biological sex. Instead, it admits patients across several gender identities while continuing to reject males who identify as male.

That distinction affects a population already harmed by the eating disorder field’s historic failure to recognize them. A boy with anorexia does not have a less serious disease because he identifies as male, and an adult man with bulimia or binge eating disorder does not require less specialized treatment because his biological sex and gender identity correspond. Yet under Renfrew’s published policy, that characteristic excludes him.

If Renfrew contends that its therapeutic model requires a female environment, the admission of transgender women and nonbinary patients defeats that explanation. If biological sex supplies the justification, the admission of transgender women who were born male creates the opposite problem. If gender identity controls, Renfrew is left attempting to defend a policy under which identifying as male becomes the characteristic that closes the door.

Those operational concerns cannot explain the categorical exclusion of cisgender boys and men. Renfrew has already demonstrated that its historical treatment model can be modified to accommodate patients who fall outside the population for which the institution was originally designed. It has chosen not to make that accommodation available to cisgender males.

Financial Inclusion Has Its Own Boundary

Renfrew’s claims about accessibility extend beyond gender. Its website says the cost of care “should never get in the way of quality treatment,” advertises acceptance of more than 400 insurance plans, and prominently identifies Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cigna, Optum/United Behavioral Health and Fidelis Care.

Medicare and Medicaid are not specifically identified on that page. Renfrew knows how to tell commercially insured patients that major carriers are accepted, yet patients who depend on the country’s principal public insurance programs receive no comparable statement about access.

The omission is particularly significant because Renfrew may participate in Medicaid managed care in New York. Renfrew publicly states that it is in network with Fidelis Care for all levels of in person and virtual care. The question remains, does the Fidelis relationship include Fidelis Medicaid Managed Care?

That fact changes the character of the inquiry. Medicaid reimbursement is not merely another commercial payment source. It includes federal financial assistance and carries federal civil rights obligations. A provider accepting that funding cannot separate its public claims of “inclusion” from the nondiscrimination requirements attached to participation in federally funded health care.

Federal Money Carries Federal Civil Rights Obligations

If Renfrew accepts Fidelis Medicaid Managed Care, it is subject to Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, 42 U.S.C. § 18116(a), which prohibits discrimination on grounds incorporated from federal civil rights statutes, including sex discrimination under Title IX, in covered health programs receiving federal financial assistance.

The current regulations reinforce that prohibition. Under 45 C.F.R. § 92.101(a)(1), an individual may not, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, denied the benefits of, or subjected to discrimination under a covered health program or activity. Section 92.4 defines covered health programs broadly and provides that, for an entity principally engaged in providing health care, the relevant program can encompass all of the entity’s operations.

Renfrew’s published policy presents a direct sex discrimination question. A cisgender woman with an eating disorder falls within the population Renfrew says it treats. Transgender and non-binary people are welcomed. But a cisgender man with the same diagnosis falls outside it. The distinction is categorical and precedes any individualized clinical judgment.

The legal claim of a cisgender boy or man does not depend on contested federal protections for transgender status. His complaint is far simpler: he is male, he has an eating disorder Renfrew treats, and on the basis of sex, Renfrew excludes him from eligibility while admitting female patients.

Taken together, those facts present a focused federal question. Sources have said that Renfrew’s New York operation participates in Medicaid managed care, its provider NPI identifies The Renfrew Centers, Inc. as the legal business name, and the organization publishes a categorical admissions policy excluding cisgender boys and men.

If discrimination on the basis of sex is established, and if Renfrew accepts federal funds through Fidelis Medicaid Managed Care, they are subject to federal law. And now they may have a huge issue.

In the event Renfrew does not accept Medicaid funds, it can carte blanche continue with its discriminatory conduct with impunity from the federal government. Renfrew would then merely be hypocritical and beneath contempt. But, it’s conduct would not technically be illegal. But, if it is accepting Medicaid funds …

Meanwhile, additional issues continue internally.

Residential Treatment Forces the Issue Into the Room

Renfrew’s expansion beyond cisgender women also creates practical issues that do not arise in the abstract language of “inclusion.”

Renfrew operates residential treatment facilities in Philadelphia and Coconut Creek, Florida. At its Philadelphia residential campus, Renfrew tells incoming patients that most bedrooms contain two beds and that patients will likely have a roommate. Its published explanation says roommates are “typically paired by age,” separating adolescents from adults. It does not publicly describe gender identity, biological sex, anatomy, trauma history or patient preference as roommate matching criteria. Admitting transgender and nonbinary patients necessarily requires policies governing privacy, trauma histories, roommate assignments and intimate residential settings. Whatever difficulties accompany those decisions, Renfrew has decided they can be managed when the patient is transgender or nonbinary.

If a cisgender adolescent girl may share a bedroom with a transgender adolescent, parents are entitled to know the criteria governing that placement. The same is true for a transgender patient whose trauma history or privacy concerns may make another placement inappropriate. The clinically serious answer cannot be that identity automatically overrides every other consideration.

Those issues demand transparency.

Renfrew’s own educational material says eating disorders do not discriminate. Its “inclusion” campaign recognizes that men have historically been overlooked. Its support programming is organized around populations that have experienced marginalization (except boys and men). Its financial materials say cost should not stand between a patient and quality care. Mere empty words contradicted by its own conduct.

On September 2, 2026, Renfrew is rolling out a new virtual support group, “Sexuality and Gender Equality (SAGE) Support Group.” Gender equality? Renfrew’s hypocrisy cannot be understated. Pontificating on “gender equality” while systemically excluding a population which may consist of up to 1/3 of those afflicted with eating disorders is the height of inane hubris. It would almost  be humorous … if it was not so tone deaf and tragic.

After four decades of very little progress in our understanding of eating disorders, the most excluded patient is not difficult to identify.

He is the boy with anorexia.

He is the male college athlete purging in secrecy.

He is the gay man whose sexuality may place him at elevated eating disorder risk.

He is the middle-aged father with binge eating disorder.

He is the patient the eating disorder field spent years failing to see.

And at Renfrew, he is the patient standing outside … unwanted and ignored.

The Eating Disorders Education Institute (“EDEI”) wants clinicians, employers, treatment programs, and patients to treat its soon to be released credential program, EDCS, as evidence of specialized competence in eating disorder care. But a credential is only as credible as the institution issuing it. Before EDEI asks the field to trust EDCS, it must first establish why EDEI itself deserves the trust of the community.

So the question must be asked … what has EDEI done to deserve anyone’s trust? At this point, the answer is … remarkably little.

A Credential Built by Its Own Beneficiaries

EDEI is owned by a for profit limited liability company. Its leadership developed the curriculum. Founder and CEO Dr. Wendy Oliver-Pyatt already places the designation after her own name. However, the EDEI has released no evidence that the finished credential predicts clinical competence, improves patient outcomes, reliably distinguishes qualified clinicians from unqualified clinicians, or has been independently validated by an established independent specialty body, university, licensing authority, or accrediting organization.

Although EDEI may assert this as credentialing, the facts and evidence speak otherwise. Dr. Oliver-Pyatt’s for-profit organization created the standard, built the curriculum, evaluates candidates against its own requirements, awards the designation, and benefits financially if EDCS acquires value. However, authority does not become legitimate through self-declaration and profiteering.

To exacerbate this issue, the people asking the field to accept their authority make the credibility problem considerably worse.

Independence by Assertion

Chevese Turner, who is marketed as EDEI’s Founding Partner and President, recently attempted to respond to questions about the organization’s independence by declaring: “EDEI is not owned by a corporation, has no outside investors and no VC funding. Did it all ourselves out of pocket too.”

The statement sounds sweeping. It is not.

As previously stated, EDEI is owned by and operates through the Institute for Contemporary Eating Disorder Education, LLC., a for profit organization. Dr. Oliver-Pyatt founded that organization and serves as its CEO while simultaneously serving as co-founder, CEO, and Chief Medical Officer of Within Health. Ms. Turner serves as a Within Health advisor. EDEI uses a current Within Health senior clinical leader as an instructor.

The intertwined corporate and organizational structure extends much further.

A California Secretary of State filing dated April 30, 2024, identifies Within Health Group, Inc. as a manager or member of Hopeful Media, LLC. [Members are owners of an LLC. Managers in general, control the daily operations.] Hopeful Media owned and operated EDHope, a website positioned before vulnerable consumers at the precise stage when they are researching illnesses, comparing levels of care, evaluating treatment providers, and deciding whom to call.

Abhilash Patel sits in the same structure. He co-founded Within Health with Dr. Oliver-Pyatt and remains its president. Within Health describes Patel as a venture capital investor, while his professional history includes acquisitions, digital publishing, search marketing, behavioral health customer acquisition, telephone lead generation, and company growth. Patel’s investment firm, Thermal, works with early-stage companies, investment firms, and private investors.

Private capital also appears elsewhere in Dr. Oliver-Pyatt’s business network. Lindsay Goldberg identifies Sero Mental Health as an investment beginning in 2021, and corporate records connect Galen entities to that structure. Dr. Oliver-Pyatt is the founder and CEO of Galen Hope, one of the entities in the Galen system.

Against this record, Ms. Turner’s statement that EDEI itself has “no VC funding” answers very little. Direct equity ownership is only one way in which commercial enterprises can share money, personnel, technology, intellectual property, marketing infrastructure, administrative support, professional relationships, or strategic assistance.

But Ms. Turner went further. She said the founders did it entirely “out of pocket.” That is an alleged factual representation. EDEI must be able to substantiate it.

Identify the owners. Produce the operating agreement. Disclose the capital contributions and loans. Identify any related company that supplied employees, contractors, software, marketing, administrative services, intellectual property, office resources, or other support. The records can establish whether Within, Patel, Thermal, Galen, Sero, Hopeful Media, or another connected enterprise contributed anything of value.

Ms. Turner is attempting to peddle separation. The documented structure shows integration.

What Happens When the Network Receives Scrutiny

The history of Within Health and EDHope provides another reason not to accept assurances of independence at face value.

Ms. Turner previously appeared on Within Health’s advisor roster. So did Jacquelyn Ekern, founder and former owner of EDHope. On February 16, 2026, I published an article examining Within Health’s leadership and advisor composition. At that time, Within Health publicly identified a nine-person Board of Advisors, eight women and one man. The article focused in part on the records of people serving on that board. Within days, the advisor roster disappeared from the website, taking Ms. Turner’s and Ms. Ekern publicly displayed advisory relationship with it.

Ms. Ekern’s presence on that board became more consequential as the corporate relationships came into focus. Within Health Group already held a formal governance or ownership position of Hopeful Media in April 2024. Hopeful Media now operates EDHope as a Within Health company. Ms. Ekern, the founder of EDHope occupied an advisory position at the treatment company connected to the corporate structure that came to control EDHope. The public presentation of that relationship produced another revealing sequence.

On July 27, I examined EDHope’s claim that it remained an independent resource after becoming part of the Within Health structure. At the time, the website prominently invited treatment seekers to call a telephone number that routed directly to Within Health. The ownership relationship was not stated beside the number. EDHope instead used softer language such as “powered by Within,” while continuing to describe itself as independent and unbiased.

The article focused directly on that arrangement, including the treatment call routing, the ownership disclosures, the financial conflict created when a treatment company controls a provider discovery platform, and the difference between an independent resource and an admissions pathway leading to the company that owns it. EDHope’s homepage looked like this:

Shortly afterward, the presentation changed.

EDHope’s homepage now identifies the number, a different telephone number, as “Within Health Admissions.” The site states that calls currently direct to Within Health and now tells visitors near the top of the page that Eating Disorder Hope is “Owned and maintained by Hopeful Media, a Within company.”

Why were those changes implemented? If the website and relationship were transparent, why the changes? EDHope continues to call itself an “independent resource” and says it connects users with providers “without bias toward any specific program or organization.” The same homepage then directs treatment callers to Within Health Admissions, while its footer identifies Hopeful Media as a wholly owned subsidiary of Within Health Group, Inc.

The sequence speaks for itself.

Public scrutiny of Within Health’s advisors was followed by disappearance of the advisor roster. Public scrutiny of EDHope’s treatment number and ownership presentation was followed by substantially clearer disclosures that the new number listed leads to Within Health Admissions.

Transparency became more explicit only after someone started asking questions. Now the same people want clinicians to trust another assertion of independence and credibility.

The Credentialing Network

The issue is larger than whether EDEI and Within Health occupy different boxes on an organizational chart.

Dr. Oliver-Pyatt stands at the center of both enterprises. Ms. Turner moved from Within Health’s advisory structure into leadership of EDEI. A Within Health clinical leader teaches through EDEI. Within Health’s corporate network reaches Hopeful Media and EDHope, placing treatment, professional education, digital publishing, treatment discovery, advertising, and patient acquisition within overlapping business and professional relationships.

That is a commercial marketplace for access to people actively searching for treatment. EDEI wants the eating disorder community to treat these operations as sufficiently separate whenever independence becomes important. The record does not support that presumption.

Credibility Is the Larger Problem

Even complete financial separation would not answer the more serious question surrounding EDCS.

Why should Dr. Oliver-Pyatt and Ms. Turner decide who qualifies as an eating disorder specialist?

EDEI did not receive that authority from any medical specialty board, state licensing agency, university, or established independent professional body. It created EDCS itself. Dr. Oliver-Pyatt already uses the designation. [which by itself, may present a serious ethical issue with the Florida Medical Board.] EDEI/Within Health’s leadership developed the curriculum, invokes its own Delphi process as support, teaches the material, evaluates candidates, and awards the credential.

A private, for-profit organization is attempting to manufacture professional authority and then persuade an established field to recognize the product. The people controlling that process therefore deserve scrutiny at least as rigorous as the scrutiny they intend to impose on clinicians.

Ms. Turner’s public record raises serious questions about whether EDEI can credibly promise neutral evaluation.

Before entrusting Ms. Turner with authority over a credential that purports to identify clinical expertise, we should consider her past conduct and statements while exercising leadership in this field. As NEDA’s Chief Policy and Strategy Officer, Ms. Turner stated that people who had confronted their internal biases “no longer trust the medical establishment to actually help us.” [Does she now trust the medical establishment behind EDEI?]

In a podcast, Ms. Turner stated, “There may be some things with eating disorders that are brain issues. I don’t know.” Despite not knowing about an incredibly important biological/medical aspects of eating disorders, her attacks on the medical community continued.

“We have fought back in the Body Positivity Movement and don’t want to be judged on our looks, and our body size and the medical community has said ok, we will judge you on your health.” Isn’t that what the medical community does? Address health issues? Finally, Ms. Turner stated, “My heart is in the higher weight community, whether a person has an eating disorder or not.”

Ms. Turner also embraces a political framework centered on weight, oppression and identity and supports proposals extending far beyond conventional eating disorder treatment. Her public statements included demands to center selected identity groups while telling “white, straight and thin folks” not to enter certain discussions. On another podcast, Ms. Turner stated, “Our culture is set up to value and promote Whiteness.” She also stated, “It bothered me that all the air was taken by a white perspective.” Ms. Turner continued, “Let’s also acknowledge that professionalism and tone policing/politeness are constructs of systems that are embedded by white supremacy ideals. When we constantly protect the feelings of those who are oppressing then we never actually get to the work needed to undo the oppression.”

She has now made the relationship between politics and EDEI’s educational philosophy explicit, describing the work as “very political” and saying there is “no room for neutrality.” Ms. Turner goes further still when she stated, “I believe bodies are political. Everything is political.”

Those statements cannot be brushed aside when EDEI uses live practicums in which its own evaluators judge clinicians’ reasoning and readiness.

A physician may reject weight neutrality as a governing medical doctrine. A psychologist may decline to use intersectionality as a clinical framework. Dietitians can disagree with body liberation theory. Other clinicians may believe political advocacy should remain separate from determinations of medical and professional competence. EDEI has not explained what happens when those clinicians sit across from evaluators working within an organization whose president says neutrality has no place in the work.

Ms. Turner’s history gives the question additional weight. She has publicly accused perceived opponents of “gaslighting,” described men she opposed as “upskirting” the eating disorder community, criticized women who associated with those individuals, and invited others to join her in “being difficult when it comes to these people.”

Those statements reveal how Ms. Turner has treated people she regarded as adversaries or with whom she disagreed while exercising influence in this field.

Ms. Turner’s account of the competing IEDS credential creates a separate credibility problem. She stated categorically that EDEI had been developing EDCS for more than three years and that “we were not aware that the IEDS folks were working on their credential.” The contemporaneous record says otherwise.

On numerous occasions and as early as 2024, IEDS had been discussed and self-promoted as a certification program in an Eating Disorders Professional Group on Facebook. Ms. Turner actively participates in that group and has promoted the EDCS in that group. It is implausible that Ms. Turner did not see those posts. When directly confronted with that history her answer was … silence.

That matters because EDEI is selling judgment.

Its leaders want clinicians to trust their representations about independence, validation, professional standards, competing credentials, and the process by which candidates will be evaluated. Credibility therefore cannot be separated from accuracy when those same leaders speak publicly about matters within their field.

EDEI now proposes to place evaluative authority in the hands of Ms. Turner.

A Failed Attempt to Capture Professional Authority

EDEI is not simply offering another continuing education course. EDEI is attempting to position itself as the authority which defines the standard, teach the standard, evaluate compliance with the standard, and decide who may publicly claim the resulting distinction. That is an attempt to capture professional authority within an eating disorder community that never granted EDEI that authority.

The burden to establish credibility and authority belongs where EDEI has tried to avoid placing it. On EDEI. When organizations or persons shy away from and refuse to answer direct questions, there are very few reasons supporting the justification for silence.

Produce the validation. Disclose the finances. Identify the institutional support. Explain the scoring. Establish the independence of the evaluators. Account for the overlapping commercial relationships. Reconcile Ms. Turner’s public statements with the documentary record. Explain why political conformity cannot influence a live practicum controlled by an organization whose president says there is “no room for neutrality.”

Finally, be transparent. Either admit that EDEI agrees with and has adopted Ms. Turner’s radical political and social justice positions and those now constitute fundamental aspects of EDCS. Or publicly and strongly refute them. After all, in Ms. Turner’s words, “there is no room for neutrality.”

Until answers are provided, until EDEI embraces transparency, EDCS is not evidence that EDEI possesses authority over the eating disorder profession. Instead, it only constitutes evidence that EDEI is attempting to hijack that authority.

Today, August 10, 2026, my daughter Morgan would have turned 33 years old

In the past ten years, I learned that birthdays do not disappear when a loved one dies. They change. The celebrations we once imagined become quieter, more complicated occasions. Joy and grief occupy the same space. Memories arrive without warning, carrying laughter one moment and an almost physical sense of absence the next.

Still, Morgan’s birthday deserves to be celebrated.

She was born in Dallas on August 10, 1993. From the beginning, she brought intensity, humor and energy into our family. Morgan was intelligent and quick witted, an honor student and a talented artist. She loved deeply, laughed loudly and possessed a presence that people remembered.

Morgan was not a symbol. She was not a diagnosis. She was a daughter, my daughter, a sister, granddaughter and friend. She could be funny, stubborn, generous, exasperating and fiercely loyal. She had the ability to walk into a room and alter its atmosphere.

She also lived with an eating disorder for over seven years.

On October 30, 2016, Morgan died at the age of twenty-three. People who loved her were in the hospital that dark night. But love alone does not overcome an illness that had taken control of her body and mind.

No parent is ever prepared for that moment. There is no training for walking out of a room after your beloved child draws her last breath. No language can adequately describe the silence that follows. The world continues, even when your own world has stopped.

For a time, I did not know what I would do with the grief. No parent ever does. I only knew that I could not allow Morgan’s life to be reduced to the manner of her death.

After she was gone, people who had known her during treatment began telling me stories. They remembered how Morgan encouraged them, challenged them and tried to help them keep fighting. Even while she was struggling, she saw the pain in others.

One sentence from her journals has remained with me, “I can help everyone else, I just can’t seem to save myself.”

Those words broke my heart. Eventually, they also gave me direction.

If Morgan could no longer help the people she met in treatment, perhaps I could continue that work for her. I was a trial lawyer. I understood how to investigate, question institutions, examine evidence and demand answers. I knew almost nothing, however, about the scientific, clinical and commercial systems surrounding eating disorder treatment.

So, I began learning. After Morgan’s death, I spoke publicly about eating disorders and the devastation they can bring to patients and families. I spoke with patients, parents, clinicians, researchers, lawyers, advocates and survivors. With every conversation, I understood more clearly how unprepared many families are when an eating disorder enters their home. I also came to see how often the medical system fails to recognize the illness, particularly when a patient does not conform to the narrow image many people still associate with anorexia or another eating disorder.

Some patients are told they do not look sick. Others are congratulated for weight loss while their physical condition deteriorates. Dangerous symptoms are dismissed, misunderstood or attributed to something else. Families are left searching for specialists during a medical emergency, often while insurers debate whether treatment is necessary.

The consequences can be catastrophic.

I began using my legal training to help patients and families challenge insurers, treatment providers and organizations with power over the eating disorder community.

Advocacy is easy when it requires only agreeable statements and ceremonial support. It becomes more difficult when the facts demand uncomfortable questions. Who benefits from the present system? Who is accountable when treatment fails? Why are families so often required to become investigators, medical researchers and insurance experts while trying to keep someone alive?

There are people working in this field who are dedicated, compassionate and courageous. Yet good intentions cannot substitute for evidence, competence or accountability. Patients deserve more than sympathy. They deserve a system capable of recognizing illness early, providing effective treatment and learning honestly from failure.

Morgan deserved that system.

So do the people fighting for their lives today.

Over the years, I have met extraordinary individuals whose lives were nearly lost to eating disorders. Some recovered after being told there was little hope. Others survived medical crises that should have been recognized sooner. Parents have contacted me from hospitals, treatment centers and homes filled with fear. Survivors have shared experiences they had never previously spoken about.

Their stories have strengthened my belief that hopelessness must never become the organizing principle of eating disorder care.

I remain convinced that recovery is possible, even when the path is long, arduous and uncertain. Hope is not a sentimental slogan. It requires trained physicians, informed families, competent treatment, rigorous science and institutions willing to place patient welfare ahead of reputation, convenience or profit.

That is why Morgan’s 33rd birthday is not only a day of remembrance for me. It is also a day to look ahead.

In January 2027, the Texas Legislature will convene. I am working to have the Morgan Dunn Eating Disorders Education Act introduced during that session.

The proposed legislation would require medical schools in Texas to provide meaningful core instruction on eating disorders. Future physicians would learn to recognize warning signs, understand medical complications, identify refeeding risks, avoid diagnostic bias and make appropriate referrals. They would also be taught that a person can be gravely ill at any body size and that reliance on appearance or body mass index can delay lifesaving care.

The requirement would not be enormous. Eight hours of focused education and a case-based competency assessment cannot solve every problem in eating disorder treatment.

It could, however, change what happens in an examination room.

A physician might recognize the illness earlier. A patient might be taken seriously before reaching medical collapse. A parent might receive guidance instead of dismissal. Someone whose symptoms do not fit a stereotype might be properly evaluated and referred for treatment.

That single encounter could alter the course of a life.

I cannot give Morgan the years she should have had. I cannot watch her turn 33, build a career, create more art, fall in love or discover the person she would have become. Grief never releases a parent from those thoughts.

What I can do instead is continue the work her life placed before me. I cannot rewrite the ending of her story. But I can help ensure that her compassion continues to reach people she never met.

When the Morgan Dunn Act becomes law, every physician who learns to recognize an eating disorder will become part of her legacy. Every patient who receives earlier care will give her life further meaning. Every family spared even a portion of the confusion and fear we experienced will remind me why this work must and will continue.

Today, I celebrate Morgan as she lived … intelligent, creative, funny, courageous, complicated, loving and unforgettable. I remember her smile, her voice and the energy she brought into every room. I remain grateful for the 23 years that were far too few. But they were years filled with more love than death can erase.

Happy 33rd birthday my beloved Morgan. Today, I will laugh. I will cry. I will remember. And your strength and courage will continue to guide this journey.

I cannot place a present in your hands this year. Instead, I will carry your name to the Texas Capitol.

The Morgan Dunn Eating Disorders Education Act is my birthday present to you. And your incredible spirit will carry on and be noted by the number of lives saved.